2013
Single-channel video
HD, color sound
38 minutes
Dimensions variable

Ricerche: three uses Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore as the guidepost for a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the United States. While the political climate in post-war Italy in 1963 was deeply distinct from that of the United States in this contemporary moment, both are sites of a persistent political condition in which so-called value-based policy and ideology act out symptomatically to cover up underlying economic and political vulnerabilities.

Ricerche: three is an expanded (intentionally exaggerated in terms of scale) interview with 35 students at an all-women’s college in western Massachusetts. The interview unfolds on camera in such a way that you’re not entirely sure how many people are being interviewed as interviewees slowly add in as the camera, following the interviewer, shifts across the group left to right.

Using the container of an all-women’s college (with only 47 such institutions remaining in the US), Ricerche: three attempts to address the contradiction that such gender-segregated institutions are “behind” and “ahead” of the rest of society.
Many US-born women stopped being as interested in attending all-women’s colleges a few decade ago but these all-women’s schools continue to provoke rumors and fantasies in the public imagination as people identify them as hot-beds of lesbian activity/sex/sexuality. More recently, these colleges have had to address the need to accommodate students who decide (after enrollment) to change their gender from female to male. Thus the population attending the school exists on a much wider gender spectrum than the description “all-women’s college” can hold.

Production Credits:
Interviewees: Aderike Ajao, Zehra Ali Khan, Sara Amjad, Eirie Blair, Emma Boisselle, Eoin Bradley, Lisa Brea, Jasmine Brown, Octavia Cephas, Miran Chowdhury, Julia Corsetti, Jenny Daniels, Laura Donovan, Lyla Eaton, Caden Friedenbach, Tess
Guilfoile, Keenan Hale, Liz Honorato, Pavel Lopez, Laakan McHardy, Alexandra Menter, Michelle Olguin, Tejumolu Onabajo, Jessica Ortiz, Jinyoung Park, Yesenia Parra, Anarkalee Perera, Shelley Picot, Karishma Reddy Khan, Naomi Rodri, Liz Sandman, Alyssa Simari, Poorna Swami, Suleidys Tellez, Caitlin Utter, Summer Yun Zhou
Director: Brooke O’Harra
Director of Photography: Michelle Lawler
Cameras: Mike Crane, James Kienitz Wilkins, Lucretia Knapp, Nathan McGarigal
Sound Recorder: EE Miller
Sound Mix: Josh Allen
Production Managers: Amber Bemak, Karishma Reddy Khan