Fistimuff
Fistimuff is a captivating new video portrait by Archie Barry, commissioned by Channels Festival in partnership with BLINDSIDE, that explores the fluid nature of personality and erodes the linguistic and visual constructs that govern identity politics.
These ideas are channelled through the character ‘Fisti’, a bright pink superhuman who sleeps in a t-shirt, wears frilly socks and speaks in drum rolls and English. Filmed within a 12-hour period, Fistimuff is a condensation of time and a particular personal message: that to be human is to be complicated and mutable.
Stylistically, the work is reminiscent of a music video, and is accompanied by a genre-blending soundscape featuring spoken words about embodiment as a shifting experience. Concerned with creating an immersive sensory environment, the work turns everyday landscapes into scenes of agency.
The newest piece in Barry’s cyclic working methodology, Fistimuff features re-constituted and further developed audio elements from Tatsache (2017), itself a videographic expansion of ideas around duplicity and presence first explored in the live performance work Hypnic (2017).
Video Credits
Lead Artist and Composer: Archie Barry
Sound Design and Production: Sean Lowry
Cameraperson: Emmett Aldred
Fistimuff is a Channels Festival commission co-curated by Kelli Alred and Laura Couttie.
Supported by BLINDSIDE through the City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria.
Starts in 4 days
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BIOGRAPHIES
Archie Barry
Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work converges language and bodily gestures within a self-portraiture practice. By curating ontological spaces between what is and what can be, Barry envisages alternate possibilities for the ever-evolving architectures of personhood.
Barry graduated with a Masters of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) in 2017. They have exhibited work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Buxton Contemporary, the State Library of Victoria, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Artspace and ALASKA Projects. Barry's solo performance projects have been staged at the the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Artspace, the Meat Markets, Neon Parc and the State Library of Victoria.
IMAGE
Archie Barry, Fistimuff, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Darren Sylvester.