The film ‘My Fantasy Sister. My Sister’s Fantasy’, was the result of a month long residence period in my house/studio in the small mountainous village of Chelva, Spain. I invited a friend to share the month of December and the huge medieval house with me. We didn’t really know each that well, we’d met through a mutual friend (my fellow collaborator Richard Taylor) whilst I was living in Amsterdam, so the first few weeks of that month consisted of getting to know one another, and as time progressed we relaxed into a sibling-like role. Dressing up and messing around, I settled into my familiar role of wide eyed girl-child, and Kim became my sister. Our difference in gender became irrelevant, as we grew closer. We went around the village telling people we were ‘hermanas’ with a wry grin, ‘hermanos you mean?’ they would say. We invited some local town folk to the exhibition opening we had at the house at the end of December. My town crush, the village vet even turned up. Although I’m pretty sure we shocked him into hiding after seeing our film, with our full frontal exposure. I laughed that Kim got to go home the next day, and didn’t have to deal with the aftermath! A single 31 year old woman living on her own in a small Spanish pueblo, people talk anyway, this was just extra fodder for the fire.
So it initially began as an exploration of our surroundings; a curious place, full of wonder and enchantment, it then became an investigation of ourselves as the looking-glass turned inwards. Donning the twin guises of sisters Alicia y Alicia in a mime of girlhood, we acted up and acted out an unconscious desire for sameness in order to eclipse (our) sexual difference. To explore a sexuality that was tense with longing, perpetually suspended in a net of recaptured fantasies; where girlhood is reclaimed and renegotiated, and sibling relations entice and ignite. Under the wing of childhood we return to a place where gender loses all relevance. Becoming her, becoming her.
An afterword:
Thinking back to our time together, we were both playing out our own fantasy, segregate yet together. Simultaneously sliding through our own flesh, but not necessarily embodying the same desire. Side by side, as we appear to mirror, until at last we expose our difference. Yet it is more than gender, the roles extisted because of our own separate fantasies, unrelated and yet bought together through a shared language of coveted desire, loss and longing.
My Fantasy Sister. My Sister’s Fantasy, 2012. Kimbal Bumstead & Prefix-poly
