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ARETUSA hydro_VOX selected for competition at the XV Festival Curta Açores 2024
ARETUSA hydro_VOX by Juliana Wexel, CIAC researcher, will be screened on November 4th at 8:30 pm at the Ribeiragrandense Theatre on São Miguel Island, during the competition of the Festival Curta Açores 2024. The festival has been running for 11 years and is the oldest in the Azores. Admission is free.
The audiovisual narrative of ARETUSA hydro_VOX is centred on a cyber-feminist autofictional interpretation of the myth of the Greek nymph Aretusa, narrated by the nymph in book V of the Metamorphoses, by the Roman writer Ovid, about the ancient freshwater spring on the small island of Ortigia, in Sicily, Italy. Portrayed by literary canons and popular culture as a love story between the nymph Aretusa and Alphaeus, in ARETUSA hydro_VOX, the myth is exposed as an attempt of sexual violation.
The project was developed on the basis of an autoethnographic practice by Juliana Wexel, an FCT-CIAC research grant holder and PhD student in Digital Media Art (DMAD-CIAC), while she was living on the island of Ortigia between 2022 and 2023.
ARETUSA hydro_VOX has a post-digital character, as it uses digital technology in the service of an artivist aesthetic discourse contextualised in the vulva art movement. The narrative in ARETUSA hydro_VOX privileges the point of view of intersectional feminism, where ethnicity, class and gender are relativised in the interpretation of the oppressions of patriarchy. It deals with male symbolic violence, which has also been perpetrated in canonical literature since classical antiquity. Violence that is the extreme result of the appropriation of freedom, the domestication of pleasure and the violation of “women, goddesses and nymphs have no peace in their land, even less in their bodies” (ARETUSA hydro_VOX, 2024).
The first cyber-performance version of the narrative, “Aretusa Vox”, was developed in the context of the CyPeT project, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology , and was presented during the Cyberperformance Symposium: artistic and pedagogical practices, the final milestone of the CyPet project, in June 2023, at the University of the Algarve in Faro, Portugal.
ARETUSA hydro_VOX combines the researcher’s artistic research within CyPeT and her theoretical and practical experiences as a member of Writing Urban Places. The project is one of the computational artefacts developed in the context of Juliana’s research, as part of her ongoing thesis “Vulva Art and cyberperformativity: contributions to the understanding of feminist aesthetic discourses in digital media art“. The audiovisual project was supervised by Bruno Mendes da Silva and Mirian Tavares, coordinators at CIAC. Recently, ARETUSA hydro_VOX was also part of the experimental video category of the international competition at the 28th AVANCA 2024.
More details about the Curta Açores Festival (here)
The ARETUSA hydro_VOX project is both the result and the development process of the CyberPerformanCity method, designed for the creation of artistic intervention projects and artefacts that mediate between urban and digital spaces. More information (here).
Esta publicação também está disponível em: Portuguese (Portugal)
