If She Were a Barber
Single-Channel Video, 11minutes 50seconds;
Four-Channel Video Installation, 12 minutes; work-in-progress
If She Were a Barber explores personal choices and the intertwined histories of two professions—if she hadn’t been a surgeon, she might have become a barber. Once a single profession before diverging, barbering and surgery share similar tools. The film stages repetitive body-related actions—health care, sewing, combing—while weaving interviews on 1970s career choices, fragmented memories, and invisible violence, recited by different women.
Re-edited footage from The Woman Barber (1962), a propaganda film advocating for women’s labor liberation in the service industry, reinforces this hypothetical proposition, shifting its narrative from liberation to suspected marital murder. Is imagining an alternative possibility as resistance to reality itself also a form of violence? The project captures moments of vulnerability, probing the fluid power dynamics of care, control, harm, and intimacy.
Single-Channel Video, 11minutes 50seconds;
Four-Channel Video Installation, 12 minutes; work-in-progress
If She Were a Barber explores personal choices and the intertwined histories of two professions—if she hadn’t been a surgeon, she might have become a barber. Once a single profession before diverging, barbering and surgery share similar tools. The film stages repetitive body-related actions—health care, sewing, combing—while weaving interviews on 1970s career choices, fragmented memories, and invisible violence, recited by different women.
Re-edited footage from The Woman Barber (1962), a propaganda film advocating for women’s labor liberation in the service industry, reinforces this hypothetical proposition, shifting its narrative from liberation to suspected marital murder. Is imagining an alternative possibility as resistance to reality itself also a form of violence? The project captures moments of vulnerability, probing the fluid power dynamics of care, control, harm, and intimacy.
Still; Super 8mm and Digital; 2025