WITH AN HELMET – fair and lost.

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Live performance by Francesca Fini (2013)
This work is about the monstrosity of social conditioning. During the performance I’m wearing electrodes on both arms and I try to wear makeup. Involuntary muscle contractions caused by electric shock are very strong so that I cannot control the hands and the makeup spreads all over my face. “In a collapsing soul the hand doesn’t know that the head wants to be beautiful”.
During the performance we hear the chorus of Nabucodonosor by Giuseppe Verdi, which has a very strong symbolic value in the history of my country, bringing along the ghosts of old struggles for freedom that no one remembers anymore. “My country, fair and lost”. The hysterical, uncontrollable, movement of the hand represents the disease of social habit, which reveals its fragility when the system appears on the point of collapsing. Even crying is involuntary, caused by the black pencil and mascara entering my eyes since I cannot calibrate the movement of the hand. A mechanical cry that is automatically transmitted to the audience, in a sort of empathic conditioned connection, unconscious and therefore completely useless.