Flowers Blooming In Our Throats ( 2020)
Eva Giolo
Flowers Blooming In Our Throats Eva Giolo Italy 16mm > digital9 min 2020
Flowers Blooming in Our Throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. A dialogue of gestures, made up of repeated visual sequences where time is marked by the spinning of a small toy top, as unstable and precarious as the balance of a relationship. The artist repeatedly uses a red filter on her lens, creating a conceptual device that relies on an element of abstraction to conceal and transfigure the image. The mechanical insertion of the filter over the lens thus becomes the simulation of a violent act, immediately changing the way we perceive and remember an action we have seen before. This coexistence of opposites can also be found in the title, which metaphorically suggests how the beauty of natural phenomenon—and implicitly, love—can turn into a suffocating force. – Leonardo Bigazzi
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Elephy.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Eva Giolo.
about the artist
Eva Giolo (Belgium) is an audiovisual artist working in film, video, and installation, born in Brussels in 1991. Her work places particular focus on the female experience, employing experimental and documentary strategies to explore themes of intimacy, permanence, and memory, along with the analysis of language and semiotics. Giolo uses her camera to capture the “mundane” moments of the everyday to reveal their hidden depth. After pursuing music at East London University (2011), she received a BA in Media Arts (2015), and an MA in Fine Arts (2016) from Royal Academy Fine Arts Ghent. Her films, installations, and other projects, including Remote (2016), A Tongue Called Mother (2019), The Taste of Tangerines (2020), and Study of Gestures_01 (2020), have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata, Viennale, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Lago Film Fest, FIDMarseille, Courtisane Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and Cinéma du Réel, among others. She is the recipient of a VAF Wildcard Prize (2016), the Cedric Willemen Award (2019), and special recognition from the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation (2020). She was an artist in residence at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (2018–2020), WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, CASTRO Studio Program (2021), RU Unlimited, and Fogo Island Arts (2022). Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (2020) was nominated for the European Film Awards (2020), and received Grand Prize from This Is Short, a collaborative online event co-presented by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Vienna Short Film Festival, and other European organizations. She is co-founder of the Moving Image Atelier (Belgium), and co-founder and Artistic Director of Elephy, a production and distribution organization for film and media art, with Rebecca Jane Arthur, Chloë Delanghe, and Christina Stuhlberger. She lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.