Giulia Essyad

Giulia Essyad’s artistic practice is heterogeneous and ranges from performance to video, from sculpture to poetry. Her research revolves around her own body, which becomes a tool to carry out an investigation into female identity, its stereotypes, and the marketing of women’s image. The recurring element in her work is the presence of the artist’s body, often manipulated with Photoshop, turned in different colors, caught in poses that recall iconographies from art history, but also the aesthetics of selfie culture and catchy advertising images. Her visual universe is nourished by the aesthetics of video games, fantasy and science fiction genres, that seem to update some ancestral characters to the age of streaming and 3D cinema, while attesting to the persistence of some archetypes in contemporary culture. Blue is a color often used by the artist for its symbolic value: it is a rare color in nature, often associated with the idea of artificial—therefore digital—, related to extraterrestrial beings, but also to a certain idea of purity, with reference to the blue blood of the aristocracy but also to the color of the liquid used instead of blood in ads for tampons.

In the video BLUEBOT:Awakening, Essyad presents a feminist science fiction story, staging a matriarchal community assisted by robots with emotional intelligence: the Bluebot dolls. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where women, creators of these blue machines, are the only survivors. The plot unravels in a fragmentary and enigmatic way, both from a narrative and a technical point of view, since real footage is alternated with computer-generated images and 3D miniature animations. Childish and sensual at the same time, the doll suggests a deep connection with the artist’s own body that provides it with memory and life that, although artificial, escapes the creator through an independence of thought.

Sara de Chiara