Anita Di Bianco (US/DE) | Com Viet

SYNOPSIS

Marguerite Yourcenar, master of evocation of the ancient world, is herself evoked here, in a literary haunting of several well-trodden Berlin locales. Excerpted from an interview with the writer in 1980, actor Jean-Baptiste Naudy reflects on the abyss between 20th century European notions of love and those of the ancients – Hadrian’s love for Antinous, the ideals of love transmitted by French novels and by literary culture in general, and Yourcenar’s transmission of those notions through her own intimate relationship with literature, with history as a material of shifting properties, consciousness, points of convergence. Playing on the borrowing of a literary tradition, updating this interview into another context, drawing out the actor’s own relation both to inhabiting the current space and conditions of the city while reflecting Yourcenar’s timeless conceptions of real and fictional love and longing.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Anita Di Bianco is a film and video maker living in New York and Berlin. Her short films take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined literary and film characters – excerpting and adapting the texts of such authors as Jean Genet, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Gertrude Stein, as well as revisiting familiar media rituals and pop-cultural tropes. Di Bianco’s videos and films have been shown at PS1 and at the Carnegie Arts Center in New York, at the Rotterdam Film Festival, at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, at the Salzburger Kunstverein, Cinematexas film festival in Austin, and at Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zürich, doggerfisher in Edinburgh, among other venues. She has screened her work and lectured on the politics of re-makes at the Midwestern Art History Conference, at the seminar Diffusion and Confusion at Konstfack in Stockholm, at Klartext! The Status of the Political in Contemporary Art in Berlin, at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in London, and at Yale University’s film school. She is an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2008.

FILMOGRAPHY

• 2008_ Com Viet, 31'00'', 16mm film transferred to HD video, colour
• 2007_ Ballad In Plain D, 7'00'', 16mm film transferred to HD video, colour
• Du Reve Et Des Drogues, 25'00'', HD video, colour
• Studies For J, 6'00'', 16mm film, colour
• 2006_ The Dead Souls Scandal, 10'00'', 16mm film, color
• 2004_ Letters From The Unsuspecting, varying duration, digital video, colour
• Disaffection And Disaffectation, 50'00'', digital video, colour
• 2003_ Pressed into Palm, 7'00'', digital video, colour