Stephanie Sant
In this series I’m talking to the artists involved with Nanny Cam, the film screening we have curated of works by artists who do not have a degree in Fine Art, showing London and Liverpool this June.
open calls can move kinda slow. u put one out and get occasional emails when someone has put themselves forward and bravely asked u to consider them/ it’s gentle and stressful/ but even as our Nanny Cam open call was waiting for these videos to appear, I was on Instagram every day n i was wondering. not exactly searching but hoping for encounters, for the right kinda thing/ because I thought I could pin little videos between the submissions accumulating in our email inbox/ these smaller clips could be coins down the side of the couch; videos of just seconds like bumpers for bigger productions. I was working out the shape of the screening when I found Malta-based @stephaniesaint: Stephanie Sant, *and it wasn’t like a light bulb went off, but like an ember was glowing where everything else on the timeline was tryin 2 hard to be slick.* I did some internet stalking to check she hadn’t studied Fine Art (bc we are holding Fine Art at arm’s length in this curation and asking everyone else what the world looks like: Stephanie studied Photography which lives on the same road but not the same house. Photography’s house is cleaner, people have to take off their shoes when they visit n wash their hands before they eat).
we’ll be showing three of her Instagram videos on the night. i don't want to describe them too much - just to say that their brevity is careful, they are good treasures and I am excited to see what happens when they are blown up away from the phone and onto a wall. i skyped Sant to talk a little (it is nice to get to know ur artists, n also to remember they are yours 2 keep). ‘I create an archive of things that I like so that maybe I film them with an expensive camera some day, for example. Obviously it wont happen but that’s the mentality. That’s why I was extra excited that you were interested in them.’ knowing this now it’s like we have seized the early drafts of the real handling of a scene, but it’s like - you know when you think there’s an extra step at the bottom of the stairs and you go to make it but it isn’t there - - that moment. o how many metaphors can i squeeze in this text, like 9 million. / She continued, ‘People can still be touched by something that is three seconds long. I think it defies these institutions of art, of film, that you go and they give you all these rules. It’s great to remind art enthusiasts and the audience that you can still be touched by these videos and artworks without having an education and without going to these institutions.’
ye * make the timeline the gallery you want *
* Sant is also exhibiting ‘DIAMOND,’ a longer video in which she navigates an improvised conversation with actor Soon Park. ‘I was watching a lot of these really sweet audition tapes on YouTube of actors when they were young, before they made their big debut. It was so interesting, because it's always a bleak room and they manifest something and create something from the little they have.’ In the video, the Sant and Park talk in an empty studio as Park arranges blank pieces of A4 paper on the ground, making himself a garden. He says he’s a writer, he looks apathetic but also amused. ‘DIAMOND was basically when I was knees-deep in Deleuze and Guattari's ‘Anti-Oedipus,’ a person as a multiplicity; a diamond is a multiplicity. I wanted to tap into the multiplicities of this performer. It was confusing for both of us - he was confused at most times. It was like playing pretend but we’re adults. There are funny moments when he was getting pissed off. He’s an actor, he wanted a script. He wanted papers and I gave him blank papers, I think. A really nice narrative came out of it.’
nanny cam has arching narratives like DIAMOND but they are going to be paperclipped by contributions from instagram and snapchat / it’s going to make the right shape im feelin / im v excited for june xxx
