My answer to Rick Prelinger’s query on “Memory, Collection, and Creative Practice” as part of my PhD qualifying exam. Both/and… uses personal media, home movies featuring domestic workers, and 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.
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, employed by Ralph Barton as a maid, 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… Kiki Loveday’s video Journal remixed in Both/And…Both/And… at The Femmes Video Art Festival at The Situation Room in Los Angeles.
Kiki Loveday 