All you need to do is take it
All you need to do is take it
Cinzia Mutigli & Freya Dooley 2023
55mins 30secs
HD film with stereo sound, colour, 1920 x 1920
Collaborative solo exhibition at GS Artists, Swansea
02.06.23 - 24.06.23
Supported by Arts Council of Wales
All you need to do is take it incorporates writing, sound, print and animation exploring relationships between self-help culture and consumerism. The exhibition comprises an animated film, sound, print and text installation transversing themes of feeling (better) and being (bearable). The film and audio work gradiates through shifting moods and landscapes of Candy Crush Saga, impulse buying, voices of authority, Tupperware, blisters, and there are also a couple of encounters with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Developing the work through a conversational process, our research and writing explores self-soothing mechanisms and our relationship to ‘solutions’ and distractions from difficult feelings and structures of un-wellbeing. The work considers private and public behaviours in connection to neoliberal, individualised approaches to fulfilling both real and invented needs, and some of the ways we are invited or expected to help ourselves navigate unstable systems.
12 episodic narratives expand scenarios such as clothes shopping in a supermarket or collecting a parcel, to reflect on wider subjects of money, use, value, authority, and depression. We are interested in the frictions of an interior emotional life making contact with the external world, and the blisters that this rubbing creates.
Printed imagery on the exterior of the gallery depicts bulging bubblewrap and the soft colour gradients ubiquitous on social media infographics and instagrammable affirmations.
The film’s narration is captioned. Audio description of the exhibition space is available at the front of the gallery, with headphones hung on the wall on your right. The exhibition is wheelchair accessible, and there is seating in the space. Some of the texts that have informed our research are available to browse at the back of the gallery.
The project is supported by Arts Council of Wales. The research and development stages of the project were supported by Arts Council of Wales, Fieldwork, Lizzie Lloyd & WITTA and Arnolfini.
A test-bed performance of the writing in its early stages was presented at WITTA, Arnolfini, Bristol in April 2023. WITTA (Writing In / To / Through Art) is a research initiative, founded at UWE Bristol by Dr Lizzie Lloyd and co-run with Dr. Kit Poulson. It brings together arts practitioners and researchers from across the university and beyond who are interested in the broad crossovers with, and intersections between, words and art.
Interview with Cinzia Mutigli and Freya Dooley by Anja Stenina