cecilia and her selfhood.
Based on a song by the Villagers, titled "Cecelia and Her Selfhood," this project tells the story of a boy who falls in love with the statue of Cecilia, and when the statue is broken he ventures to find who destroyed it.
Men falling in love with statues is not as bizarre as you may think, the whole song evokes thematic ideas similar to the greek myth of Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a famous sculptor who created a statue of a woman out of ivory that was so lifelike he fell in love with it. Aphrodite, goddess of love, took pity on him and turned the statue into a real woman. This ancient greek myth has inspired many contemporary stories including Disney’s Pinocchio, or George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion which then became a musical and film under the name of My Fair Lady.
All of these stories, including “Cecelia and Her Selfhood” portray women as the ideal objects of men’s desires, crafted by their own hand to be exactly what their fantasy should be. They touch upon ideas of intense romanticization and obsession, and leave the women quite literally objectified, being a vessel, not a real person, for them to love.
This body of work explains this narrative from a female perspective. Having the story told from a woman’s point of view makes this a conscious observation of the romanticism this boy places on the statue. It expresses the internal battle with true identity, and how much is original and how much of it is crafted by what other's want you to be, It deals with desire, control, frustration, mystery. There is no explicit narrative visually, only in the lyrics, allowing the video to be a purely emotional response to all the expressions of feeling.