The final girl
video, 2018Watch the preview with sound via vimeo
This video was presented at The Vishal in a group show called Frankenstein
Participating artists: Mette Sterre, Saskia Burggraaf, Nathaniel Mellors, Jonas Ohlsson and Koen Vanmechelen.
The Final girl is a trope in horror movies (particularly slasher). It refers to the last (usually white) woman alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The Final girl has been observed by writer and researcher Carol Clover. In the book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Clover suggests that in these movies, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification with the final girl partway through the movie. The book ‘Frankenstein’ is the first sci-fi novel written by a woman. So when I was asked for an exhibition with the same title as the only woman participating, I started to research the role of women in horror and the art world. I also used elements of the art world. In my video 'The final girl' gets confronted with many cultural habits and difficulties. She switches from hero to victim and back, her actual role remaining unclear in the movie. She switches from the sublime, overwhelming nature of the south of Ethiopia, in the Dorze Mountains, to the bizarre (and actual) set of the cult movie ‘Planet of the Apes’, and finally she tries to survive the “Hell on earth”, The Danakil Depression, a surreal landscape that looks like another planet, near Eritrea. These places refer to the cinematic roles we always play, the references to movie scenes we all know, but also the loneliness a woman can experience in a world built by patriarchy. Using greenscreen and animation the protagonist becomes an absurd overload of a gamelike character, one which has to overcome the bigger questions in life.
Mixed media : analog and digital video, animation, greenscreen, photography, music in collaboration with Menzo Schrik.