FRIDAY 7 NOVEMBER
DAVID MEDALLA performance - 6 pm
An evening performance exloring the myth of the Venus de Milo, and the legends regarding beauty...

*Often within you work, you depict social issues relating to how cultural structures influence human behaviour - more specificly it seems like you are interested in phenomena that are related to dying traditions, like in 'Big V'. What builds up your relationship to stereotypes, and to archetypes?

Georgina Starr: I'm always drawn to transitory subjects, not so much 'dying traditions', but things which are often sidelined or neglected. In my recent project Theda (2007), I became interested in a particular actress's performances because I had read that all her films had been lost and destroyed, and this became the starting point for the work. This sort of investigation into 'loss' or the intangible has re-surfaced throughout all my work. Even early works like Getting to Know You (1995) where I tried to piece together a strangers personality through various psychic readings, or Static Steps (1993) where I attempted to invent a new dance language from randomly moving tissue paper, were all dealing with ephemeral phenomena like memory or psychological states or invisible forces, all which I would try to unravel and transform into something more tangible or concrete.
Inevitably in the process of making the work the original idea or focus often change and it's never clear what the work will become. For instance with Big V (2004), it actually started out as an investigation into collective memory and history. I got someone to track down 12 people I'd grown up with in Leeds and they were all given a photo of myself with them (many from over 30 years ago), and they were asked to talk about what they remembered. The actual process of tracking the people down took a really long time and I was getting frustrated with waiting for results so I started writing my own stories, both real and invented, and this unexpectedly led me to recall details from my religious upbringing and the work finally became about Catholicism, self harm and teenage saints.

*Throughout your career, you have operated and exhibited in all of the so-called centres of the contemporary art world - but you have also been involved in projects outside of the main 'trading routes', like in the case of the Pinksummer gallery, in Genova (Italy). What is your relationship to the peripheries of the art world, and do these in any way influence your practice?

G.S.: I've shown work pretty much everywhere it's true. But the projects I've enjoyed most are where I've been given places to work with or respond to, and often these have been 'off the map'. With Big V for instance I was asked to propose a work for my home town Leeds, and other projects started out like that. The Nine Collections of the Seventh Museum (1994) came out of being asked to 'respond' to a particular town (Den Haag) which had 6 museums, and the work eventually grew out of my depression and boredom of a 3 week stay in a cramped hotel room in the city, or Popping Up in Ooststellingwerf (1999) where I was commissioned to make a work for a very remote and peaceful region of Holland and ended up staging a rock festival/song 'anthem' competition in the middle of a forest with 15 local bands which attracted an audience of 2,000 to come and watch them play live (plus they'd all written a special 'anthem' for their town). In 2003 I was invited to make a work in the Villa Medici gardens in Rome which was an amazing place to make work for. I reconstructed the garden from the final scene in the Otto Preminger film Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), it's set in an enclosed 3metre high brick walled garden, which I had constructed for the exhibition. Inside there were all the props from the scene in the movie, including a freshly dug child size grave, but I also placed a 6 year old girl inside the garden for the opening of the exhibition. You could only view the garden by climbing ladders to look inside.
    I often work best when I'm put in these odd places or given a different platform to show the work, ie. outside of a gallery space.
    But the Pinksummer gallery which you mentioned is actually a very special place, they are two really interesting women who have an amazing project space which is a beautiful old apartment in Genova with 10 metre high ceilings, every few years they invite me to propose a project for their space. The first thing I did there was The Bunny Lake Collection (2001) where I designed and made a collection of clothes (influenced by Italian director Dario Argento's horror movie victims) and used local Genovese girls to stage a catwalk fashion show. However, like the sculptures I have made for the Royal Academy exhibition, the dresses were only made to be destroyed, in fact they were only complete when an action had taken place. During the catwalk show a gang of 10 children burst into the space wielding guns and shot at the models who collapsed on the catwalk in a heap of dresses, bodies and red blood. The audience weren't aware this was going to happen.
    To go back to your question, really I'm just interested in making work and developing projects where ever that might be, sometimes they're shown in known places but often they're not in particularly famous 'art world centres', there is a freedom that comes with that, the downside is that sometimes not many people get to see it the work (say if it's in Den Haag or Ooststellingwerf or even Genova).

*Can you tell us something more about your installation for the Royal Academy?

G.S.: A seed of an idea was planted while I was making Theda (2007). Theda Bara had made 40 movies during her 5 year career and, as I mentioned before, all but two have been lost or destroyed. While I was researching her films I discovered the many strange characters she'd played and the odd scenarios she had acted out. In lots of the movies she played the artist's model or muse; in one particular film called The Forbidden Path (1918) she had played a woman who an artist had fallen in love because of her astounding beauty. The artist had used her as his model, drawing and sculpting her as 'Beauty/Youth'. As the story developed the model fell on hard times and years later she was a fallen woman, alone and penniless in the gutter. The artist, who happened to be passing by saw her and this time wanted to sculpt her as 'decrepitude' or 'death'. On reading this story I suddenly imagined a sculpture, one-side 'youth and beauty' the other 'age and death'. So I had a sculpture made as a prop for my Theda film. In my version the actress sees the 'double' sculpture in a gallery and is distraught by her own image, she enters the gallery and destroys the work. For my film  I had to smash the sculpture, and when I did this something happened in my studio, as if an energy or spirit had been released. I also thought quite a lot about the artist Camille Claudel who I was reading about at the time and who destroyed many of her own sculptures through frustration and angst. I wondered what it would be like if it was to actually happen in real-life in a gallery or museum. What would it mean to smash a sculpture? How would it feel to do it? What would the gallery visitors do? Would the spirits of the original models be released when I smash them? It seemed to me that the Royal Academy is a perfect place for me to try this out.

*Do you feel you connect in a particular way with any of the artists in the Event Horizon programme?

G.S.: To be completely honest I'm not familiar with all of the artists in Event Horizon, but looking at the program Anthony and Jen have devised and reading about the work there's definitely a very solid connection. It reminds me of a show I was part of at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the mid 90s. It was a show called 'Wild Walls' where many of the artist made live works and performance. At the opening Aernout Mik had the gallery guards (or people dresses as guards) sleeping and lounging about in the museum; Pipilotti Rist had a live video link where she interviewed the guests arriving and projected the video; and I set up a nightclub called 'The Hungry Brain' with actors, dancers and musicians playing roles from scripts I'd written. I borrowed furniture from the museum's design collection and used the museum opening as the set for a video I was shooting, so the viewers became like extras on the film. The whole show was very fluid and constantly changing so you were never sure (as a viewer) if you were looking at the work or taking part in it. I think that many of the artist in Event Horizon are interested in working in this way...