In Her Interior

In Her Interior (Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt)

In 2015 Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini formed In Her Interior (IHI) to co-create and perform live works of spoken/sung and recorded text and video within site-specific installation environments. As an unfaithful follower of constraint-based experimentation across various art traditions, IHI’s work often involves accomplices – local land custodians, sound artists, birdwatchers, writers, philosophers, gleaners. To date IHI has performed in galleries, dedicated performance spaces, repurposed industrial settings, academic environments, and theatres—in Helsingør, London, Berlin, New York, Adelaide, Byron Bay, Sydney and Melbourne. Collaborations include B.A.B.S., The Darkening: Language lined with flesh lined with language, Songs for Skinwalking the Drone (a commissioned libretto), Hexing the Alien, echolalia: golden iterations, The Tender Alembicians Suite and a mouth swallowing the storm. As two of the four co-founders of cyberfeminist group VNS Matrix (est. 1991), da Rimini and Barratt have contributed to global critiques of gender and technology across three decades. In 2016, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, VNS Matrix wrote and performed a new text, A Tender Hex for the Anthropocene.

The themes driving the _this breath project resonated strongly with subject matter that IHI have been exploring collectively and individually over many years. _this breath inspired us to inhale deeply and craft a new poem through a process of collage and enabling restraints. “Publishing” the poem as a shopfront installation reframes the work in the tradition of Gene Youngblood’s expanded cinema, a seminal text which informs our process.