Both/And…

Both/and… uses personal media, high profile ‘home movies’ featuring domestic workers, and other found footage to domesticate the raced and gendered imaginary of the moving image by literalizing the idea of the canon. In a visual pun using Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, the heavy artillery of socialist revolution becomes a conceptual prosthetic, a feminist dildo used to fight a different kind of battle.

*Made on short order in answer to Rick Prelinger’s query on “Memory, Collection, and Creative Practice” as part of my PhD qualifying exams at University of California Santa Cruz. Screened at The Situation Room and L.A.C.E. in Los Angeles as part of The Femmes Video Art Festival. Special thanks to Rick Prelinger and Micol Hebron.

*The Fall of the Romanov Empire*, Esfir Shub, 1927, remixed with Kiki Loveday’s home media in Both/And…

An unidentified domestic worker looks on, laughing, as heiress Evelyn Walsh McLean makes a home movie, year unknown, remixed in Both/And…

Paula Fichtl, long employed as a housekeeper by the Freud family, is introduced in a title card, along with their new dog Jumbo, a Pekingese, in the Freud’s home movies, remixed in Both/And…

Mary Hutchins, a domestic worker employed by Ralph Barton, appears as Nanine, “Camille’s faithful maid,” in Ralph Barton’s home movie version of Camille, scripted by Anita Loos (1926), remixed in Both/And…

Top left: Freud family home movies; Top right: Ralph Barton’s Camille; Bottom left: Kiki Loveday’s family footage; Bottom right: Mystery of the Hope Diamond: Behind the Scenes (Smithsonian, 2013).

Top left: Freud family home movies; Top right: Paul Robeson in Ralph Barton’s Camille; Bottom left: Kiki Loveday’s family footage.

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