video, 7.38 min, sound 5.1

Archive material from:

Familie Vavriceck, Elfriede Irrall, Sieglinde Kurzy

Concept / Camera / Sound / Post-Production:

Kristina Cyan

Voice: Rosie Benn

Thanks to: Film Museum Vienna, Constanze

Ruhm and Digitale Media Art class, Rosie Benn,

Nazira Karimi, Akademie der bildenden Künste

The project highly questions the emergence and re-enforcement of modernist distinctions between public and private spaces and inherent body politics. Focusing on questions of hybridity and blind spots the project aims to reflect

those dichotomies and re-establishment heteronormative modes of gender roles. The installation will try to outline zones of vulnerability within the spectrum of feminist discourses.

The film material from the Amaterinen* project (archive of Film Museum Vienna), which I researched, included lots of shots, depicting the filmmakers with their camera.

The camera was not only a tool of production but also a tool of emancipation and representation, allowing women to cross the lines of privacy and to turn private spaces into a political agenda. That's why I selected mainly those parts that perform the translation of distinct territories into hybrid, semi-public semi-private spaces. I tried to montage a dialogue of the found footage and our

presence, as well as trying to reflect the meaning of the camera, from a specialist tool to an everyday and permanently available element. I also tried to reflect on the early moments of emancipation and the actual politics of surveillance, again defining the public and private space as a territory of control.

I highlighted one of the critical views on technology, outlining how the growing possibility of digital systems questions the ethical questions of bodily presence, safety, privacy, and measurements of borders.

Accordingly, those distinct spaces have (historically) generated particular and expected sets of behavior and body politics - segregating individual habits and forms of living at home from the representational articulations of the body in the public domain. No need to say that the "private" domain is in itself a product of a public and ideologically framed assignment (reflected in the echoes of "private

is the political"). The project investigates those heteronormative distinctions and looks for the blind spots in between, for the models of behavior beyond the public-private dialectics, maybe even questions the adequacy of these concepts.