The Book of Evil Spirits
Single channel video 26’24’’, installation (performance props, mixed media). 2015
The Book of Evil Spirits contains all the names, orders and offices of all the Spirits that ever Chiara Fumai has conversed with, together with the Characters belonging to each Spirit and the manner of calling them forth to visible appearance. Now in the Book is contained the whole Art of Chiara Fumai. And although there are many performances that are said to be hers, yet none is to be compared hereunto, for this contains them all. The Book brings together a number of characters whose narratives Fumai has embodied in her performative practice to date. In creating this catalogue, Fumai enlisted the help of Eusapia Palladino, an internationally renowned 19th-century psychic and medium whose séances were attended with conviction by the likes of Nicholas II of Russia and Nobel laureates Marie and Pierre Curie. In The Book, Palladino convenes the spirits of Fumai’s motley crew of evil spirits – activists, a bourgeois society. The artist’s camp parody is itself obscured by knowing anachronism and occasional bursts of uncontrollable stage violence. The events are observed and narrated by the French scientist Camille Flammarion, Palladino’s contemporary and a scholar of mediumship, who takes turns with himself in affirming and discrediting what he sees. This place of misunderstanding and fragmentation is at the crux of Fumai’s production; presented with the sitting are various paraphernalia related to the ghosts and the medium herself – a spirit board, performance props and collages of automatic writing. ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Arrivederci.
Artist's Bio:
Chiara Fumai (Rome, 1978) is a Milan-based artist known for her performative and multi-media works featuring psychic abilities, anti-spectacle strategies and counterculture icons. She participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with a one-hundred-day performative freak show based on Italian radical feminist literature (The Moral Exhibition House, 2012), channelled the spirit of an anonymous woman in the historical art collection of the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice (I Did Not Say or Mean “Warning”, 2013) and created a fictional propaganda of Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto mirroring the first political campaign of Berlusconi (Chiara Fumai reads Valerie Solanas, 2013). For the Contour 7 Biennial of Moving Image, Fumai rewrote the story of her live acts into a séance (The Book of Evil Spirits, 2015).