Amalia Ulman on Fiction, Performance, and New Media

Amalia Ulman discusses her residency in Venice as part of AltroVE, one of fourteen projects funded by the Regione Veneto under DGR 718/2018. She conducted a workshop titled New Methods, a 2.0 version of traditional acting techniques that incorporate internet and online behavior into character creation. The workshop was inspired by Venice's Commedia dell'Arte and research at the Biblioteca di Studi Teatrali di Casa Goldoni. Ulman plans a future series of workshops and an interactive installation at TANK in Shanghai in spring 2020. She has used social media only twice in her work, aiming to blur reality and fiction, and is influenced by net art, citing Mouchette by Martine Neddam, My Boyfriend Came Back From The War by Olia Lialina, and No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes. She prefers net art for its egalitarian roots. Ulman is completing her first feature film, El Planeta, a dark comedy inspired by a mother-daughter criminal duo from Gijón, Spain, set in post-crisis Europe. She works intuitively, choosing mediums based on the idea, and now favors video due to disability. She first realized she could be an artist at age twenty when helping her boyfriend's mother, a painter, with tax forms.