are shot and produced in Emeryville California
to resemble locations abroad. Dialogue is in the language of the country
portrayed. Video footage mixes with Super-8,regular-8 and 16mm film, 35mm
slides, and computer graphics to render each narrative script in hybrid
images and layers of meaning.
MA FISH CO's faux foreign
video in Italian with English sub-titles, 1997, 25 minutes celebrates the
quadricentennial of Pulcinella's birth
Pulcinella's diasporic tale of ancient roman curses,
Marranism, and escape from Fascist Italy to Argentina is recounted for
the first time in an interview by the Italian Radio Network RAI 8. The
revelation of Pulcinella's Judaic roots challenges the benign public image
of the commedia dell'arte and casts the shadow of modernism over
its not-so-innocent origins. While the commedia's leading characters
have all but disappeared, Pulcinella survives the 20th century a complex
and alienated figure - the thoroughly modern man.
We began as a performance art / dance -
theater group. Since 1995 all of our work is on video or film, always controversial,
densely layered with meaning, and filled with visual detail, poetic subtlety
and musical invention.
As a performance group we toured the U.S., Europe,
and Japan. But in 1992 we decided to stay in Emeryville and make videos of far off places
- our Faux Foreign series started in 1992 with The Üble Marionette in Russian.
"Death by Water" is a clip from our video The Letter P and contains this message:
"We all have strength enough
to endure the misfortunes of others."