Francesca Da Rimini
Life exposures carve out patterns in the ice leading to where we find ourselves professionally. Some are easy to ascertain. Courses taken after compulsory schooling’s drab outdated offerings, inspiring lecturers who sharpened our thought processes, or a workshop gifting nascent insights. I turn to the vast ice plain. Traces of Paolo Freire’s radical pedagogy & Ivan Illich’s deschooling society praxis, marvels of language acquisition & cognitive development, Daniel Stern’s affective attunement, Jo Spence’s feminist artmaking, Silvia Federici's witchhunts & capitalism.
Swirling intersecting traceries. Subcultures, collaborations, problem-solving, platform jumping. A CV’s dry list can occlude their deeper impact, their shaping of values and principles. Beneath my trajectories through art and technology, new media, experimental media, the most exquisite tracings were subterranean. Communities and friendships formed, feelings of connection and creative possibilities, the excitement of being at the wild heart of this domain. From the collective Mongrel which deconstructed the ‘racial exclusivity of the technology industry’ coding their own digital platforms and irreverent artworks with marginalised groups, to the Italian squat culture / hacker scene which built Bulletin Board Systems for auto-production, to Furtherfield’s Do It With Others (DIWO) ethos. Ongoing collaborative rivulets include cyberfeminist group VNS Matrix, identity_runners, In Her Interior. Individual projects may melt back into the permafrost, URL links break, tapes degrade, while learnings, spirit, intention remain.
Writing forms my bedrock. Poems, zines, videos, webs, installations. Recurring themes of madness, gender, sexuality, power, and the prophetic voice. Avatars GashGirl, doll yoko, and Fury amplify the voice; collage, algorithmic generative writing techniques and remix form the matter.
