Patricia
Silva
" Twink Time at Barbizon"
Bio
Patricia Silva is a Lisbon-born, New York-based filmmaker, video artist, and photographer experimenting with original and archival media forms to reclaim and rescreen queer expression.
Their previous short films have been screened at British Film Institute's Flare LGBT Film Festival, England; Scotland Queer International Film Festival, Scotland; Rio de Janeiro's Gender and Sexuality Film Festival, Brazil; in various programs at Anthology Film Archives, USA; among others.
They received an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College, where they were ICP Director’s Fellow and earned a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. Presently teaching in New York City as professor of Video Art at St. John's University; and serving as faculty at The School of the International Center of Photography.
Synopsis
Inspired by the outdoor optical and sensorial pleasures of the Barbizon school of French painting, Twink Time at Barbizon is a Super 8mm experimental work reimagining public parks as sites where people who are historically and presently unsafe in public can imagine ourselves/themselves as free to harmlessly and openly gaze with each other, maybe even cruise each other as fems, as lesbians, as dykes, as bisexuals, as people of color, and as non-normative gender explorers.
Featuring an original score composed in France, a collaboration among Eve Beglarian (piano), John Bingham-Hall (soprano saxophone), and Lucas Papenfusscline (voice).
STATEMENT
Inspired by the realist, lush, and modest landscapes of the Barbizon school, Twink Time at Barbizon juxtaposes queer femme/fem tropes (monocle, leather jacket, pink hair) with mutating materialities and textures (river, ice, fireworks, winds). This juxtaposition gives shape and space to a scampering of safety and expression we rarely experience in crowded outdoor spaces. Twink Time at Barbizon places three queer bodies within a New York City forest in Queens and, very briefly, in Brooklyn to reclaim a Queer imaginary in which gender nonconformists serendipitously find each other outdoors in an everyday context. This was the big rebellion of the Barbizon school—they abandoned their studios to make work outside, sensorially. They chose local, picturesque locations close to home rather than travel abroad for “proper outdoor painting” in Italy, as the French Academy demanded.
State and civic aggression reduce Queer Outdoor Time, and so the ways for finding eachother is also reduced to niche indoor events, private domesticity, or those well-advertised summer parties. Outside these few established paths for Queer life, where can we chance upon eachother and feel safe acknowledging any platonic or lustful premises? By isolating behaviors that trail the gaze towards a poetics of mutual recognition and away from cruising clichés*, the visual cues in Twink Time at Barbizon may be somewhat banal. But I wanted to point to public spaces as sites where an imaginary for a variety of Queer cognition and sensoria can be activated, rather than trap such possibilities in visual form.
*overtly sexual, instant gratification, transactional, or, a lusty embodiment of capitalist models enshrouded in repressed pleasure