This project stemmed from your encounter, during your residency at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2020, with the photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and the architect Serena Olcuire. Can you tell us how you met and how you began working together?
I arrived in Rome through the Villa Medici in 2019, to represent France while also having just received the German National Prize, at a time when I felt I needed to leave Germany behind and so I tried to immerse myself in the very guts of Rome in order to escape these national frameworks and seek out sex workers with whom I hoped to build a collaboration, this process eventually led to the creation of the Feel Good Cooperative.
At a time when, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions it engaged, sex workers were prevented from working and excluded from all forms of social support, the project emerged from the idea of redirecting the cultural institution’s production budget to support them.
Stalker, a collective that has organised explorations of Rome since the 1990s by crossing both its physical and social boundaries, played an important role as it was through Lorenzo Romito, one of the group’s founders, that I met Serena Olcuire. An architect, urban planner, and transfeminist researcher, Serena Olcuire devoted her doctoral research to the geography of sex work in Rome, examining it not only through institutional policies but also through the bodies and narratives of the subjectivities directly concerned. Serena had met Alexandra Lopez through her research and introduced me to this sex worker, photographer and now also artist, and that marked the beginning of the Feel Good Cooperative.
The film strongly conveys the collective dimension of the artistic project, giving central place to the voices, experiences, and bodies of the sex workers of the Feel Good Cooperative. How did you conceive this project together?
The Cooperative’s projects always grow out of our meetings: our gatherings are chaotic, they take place everywhere from our apartments to cultural institutions passing through my studio, cafés and pizzerias…It is during these moments that we freely exchange ideas, suggestions, and images : one of us recounts an anecdote, another transforms it into a striking image, someone else adds an improbable performative gesture, and as we pass ideas from one to another, this whirlwind of performative visions keeps expanding until all that remains is to reorganise it and give it a stable form.
More specifically, this film emerged from the lived experiences shared by the sex workers of the Cooperative; drawing from those stories, the performative strategies that shaped the project unfolded with remarkable fluidity. If there is one thing that unquestionably unites us, it is an intrepid and playful performative vision, which allows us to move from recounting the most traumatic experiences to fits of uncontrollable laughter, transforming lived experience into bold, provocative, amusing and sometimes painful images.
Urban space plays a fundamental role in the film. How did you work with the geography and history of Rome’s EUR district?
Our work on urban space speaks as much about the history of the EUR district, on which the film relies, as it does about the history of the Feel Good Cooperative itself: at the intersection of art, cinema, architecture, urbanism, and the reality of sex work, our different forms of knowledge and personal experience naturally intertwined through the district’s architectural landscape.
Throughout our meetings and conversations surrounding this project, stories of the official history of Roman architecture and urban planning, along with references to cinema and the visual arts, flowed seamlessly into the personal stories of the sex workers.
In the film, we bring together both the grand, capital-H History of (male-dominated) cultural heritage and the contemporary reality of a neighborhood whose nightlife has shaped its identity far more than its rather dull daytime existence of office buildings and white-collar workers. As always, we relied on the work of other visionaries to build that bridge: Fellini in particular, whose film The Temptation of Doctor Antonio intertwines mischief, seduction, and the repression of postwar Italian society beneath the monumental arcades of the EUR district.
What did it mean to represent the complexity of this artistic project in a film? What choices did you have to make during shooting and editing?
The performance that gave rise to the film was extraordinarily rich in references, gestures, and opened onto a wide range of questions and imaginary worlds. The editing process undoubtedly reorganised these different suggestions and shaped them into a more coherent trajectory.
One of the major decisions in translating the performance into film was introducing a daytime vision of the neighborhood: in this short prologue, I wanted to include images in which the architecture of the EUR district appears almost two-dimensional, filmed in a way that strips it of its dramatic qualities, as though erasing the district’s metaphysical dimension. These daytime images are also the ones in which the Cooperative’s performers are absent as if, by magic, they had vanished from their nocturnal stage.
During the editing of both image and sound, the film’s introspective dimension grew. It allowed me to introduce more intimate moments that had not emerged during the development of the performance.
Interviewed by Margot Mecca
