Artist Talk & Screening: Elisa Giardina Papa

“U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (2022) reimagines the Sicilian myth of the donne di fora (“women from the outside and beside themselves”). Described as both magical and criminal, the donne di fora were said to possess both the feminine and masculine; the human and the animal; the benevolent and the vengeful. 

This video installation envisions the donne di fora as a gang of teenage “tuners” who ride through the utopian city of Gibellina Nuova (Sicily) on bikes customized with disruptive sound systems. The narrative voyage of the “tuners” is interspersed with poetic text and visual motifs from a 19th century collection of Sicilian fairy tales, Giardina Papa’s fragmented childhood memories of songs and stories told by her grandmother, and archival material from the Inquisition trials of the 16th and 17th centuries that criminalized women accused of being a donne di fora. 

Accompanied by ceramic sculptures of related fantastical imagery, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale repurposes the magical, ritualistic, and unruly as forces that generate an imagination beyond predetermined categories of humanness, chronological time, and mythological womanhood.

*Elisa Giardina Papa research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been disqualified and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Through critical yet poetic framing, she works across large-scale video installation, experimental films, and internet-based art projects to draw attention to those parts of our lives which, nonetheless, remain radically unruly, untranslatable, and incomputable.

Her work has been exhibited and screened at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Martin Gropius Bau, ICA London, Vienna Secession, HKW Berlin, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, 6th Buenos Aires Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento.

Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD, a Ph.D. in Film, Media, and Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily.