Festina Tarde
(Italian, "To make haste slowly")
performed, multi-media installation for six women, with film

Materials include: over 100 white bedsheets, 300 faux blackbirds, 16mm B&W film of birds in flight, steel basins & buckets, 6 knee-high shrubs, blood-substance, sound of bird songs.

Six women, in drab grey washerwomen dresses, meticulously hang and fold large stark white sheets. As the sheets take up space in front of the performers, in their outstretched arms, a grainy high-contrast film is projected across the undulating scrim of the sheets. The film captures birds flying, swooping freely across the women who continue to contemplatively and methodically tend to the wash. The women then rub their hands in a blood substance, which literally marks the work they are performing.

Film by James Browne

Presented at the BIG ART Festival, A Peculiar Works Project event, CHARAS/El Bohio, New York City
September, 1998