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LUMINOUS MATTERBianca Arnold & Moss Berke
A collaborative work between artists, writers, and lovers Bianca Arnold and Moss Berke, Luminous Matter invites viewers to experience the transformative power of the everyday, where love, dress up, and play are valued as methods of queer co-becoming.
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Alongside the film there is an article that accompanies it, further blurring lines between art and academia, film vs the written word. I am wondering what is the importance for you both in being interdisciplinary in your practices?
MB: For me, it's not exactly a question of how important it is to be interdisciplinary, it is more so just the way that I work, it is the method that I need to understand things. I think that this is largely because I am not really a film-maker by training. My background is in gender studies and is very formally academic. It is Bianca who brought me towards the potential of video, and I am so thankful to her for this because it has expanded my thinking and art-making practices. So for me, as a maker, the essay, the research, the written word, this is what grounds me. It helped me to understand the practice we were already doing in a different light, and then the images became this other layer, another medium to attempt to translate this practice. One translation attempt is the essay, another is the movie itself. But I find that at least in my own head, I need the essay. I think that, for instance, even if there hadn’t been a formal essay component to the movie, I would have needed to do all the research anyway, because the theory exists for me as a bridge to understanding, and the images are an illustration of this understanding. But I am a very text-oriented person and part of why I loved making this movie so much was because it was a practice in thinking visually.
MB: For me, it's not exactly a question of how important it is to be interdisciplinary, it is more so just the way that I work, it is the method that I need to understand things. I think that this is largely because I am not really a film-maker by training. My background is in gender studies and is very formally academic. It is Bianca who brought me towards the potential of video, and I am so thankful to her for this because it has expanded my thinking and art-making practices. So for me, as a maker, the essay, the research, the written word, this is what grounds me. It helped me to understand the practice we were already doing in a different light, and then the images became this other layer, another medium to attempt to translate this practice. One translation attempt is the essay, another is the movie itself. But I find that at least in my own head, I need the essay. I think that, for instance, even if there hadn’t been a formal essay component to the movie, I would have needed to do all the research anyway, because the theory exists for me as a bridge to understanding, and the images are an illustration of this understanding. But I am a very text-oriented person and part of why I loved making this movie so much was because it was a practice in thinking visually.
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BA: I would add also between theory and love and sex, art and daily life, and always always between the personal and the collective. My work and my research have always taken a holistic approach, a characteristic that was further reinforced by my studies in anthropology—a theoretical discipline that, more than many others, I believe compels you to constantly interconnect things, events, and stories. A great anthropologist once said that you cannot view the hand as separate from the body, nor can you ignore the fingers that make it up, and so on. It wouldn’t be a hand. An ecological way of thinking, in short. And as an artist who, during my university years, made art—let’s say—“in my spare time,” this led me to always create art inspired by what I was reading or studying, and then to revisit the theory in the projects I undertook. It’s a way of being in the world that I owe so much to the fact that I grew up and was socialized as a woman and have a female body. Women, having always been sidelined in art and culture (and in everything else), have always been ecological, making art out of their lives, their pain, their pleasure, and then turning it into theory, dissecting their blood and examining it under a microscope. Matter is multitudes, reality is multitudes, and so is the imagination. Sex is composed of a sensual orchestra, from sight to touch to taste to hearing to the scent of my beloved. And so is a film. Finally, disciplines are a dominant structure, so interdisciplinarity is resistance to this dominance.
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How has your own research informed your home video making/film making practice?
BA: That’s an interesting question for me. And I have to turn it around: it’s my video practice that has influenced my research. Let’s just say I always have my camcorder in my bag, every day. You never know what might happen—what beautiful reflection I’ll see in a window or the palm trees swaying in the wind. I’m obsessed with anything that can serve as a diary or an archive. That’s why I always carry a notebook with me, and I’ve kept a diary ever since I learned to write. Then photography came along, and I started carrying a camera. Until, on my twentieth birthday, I gifted myself a used camcorder, and from that point on, I haven’t stopped documenting my life (also) in this way. Beyond being an obsession, it is at the same time a filter and a mirror. A filter because it is through and with which I relate to others, to spaces, to events. A mirror because it is with which I relate to myself and my life. I studied Anthropology, and this in turn has greatly influenced my practice. But in a way, I studied Anthropology precisely because I was interested in people’s lives in relation to their world, and I wanted to photograph and film them as they lived their lives—at first, even better if they were distant from my own. The camera as a means of discovery and travel, and of storytelling once I returned home. Then came the shift: I studied Gender Studies and focused on my own world, and on people who were socialized like me and had bodies similar to mine. That’s when intimacy and closeness emerged. And so the camera became an intimate caress in everyday life. Ultimately, the two practices naturally intersect.
BA: That’s an interesting question for me. And I have to turn it around: it’s my video practice that has influenced my research. Let’s just say I always have my camcorder in my bag, every day. You never know what might happen—what beautiful reflection I’ll see in a window or the palm trees swaying in the wind. I’m obsessed with anything that can serve as a diary or an archive. That’s why I always carry a notebook with me, and I’ve kept a diary ever since I learned to write. Then photography came along, and I started carrying a camera. Until, on my twentieth birthday, I gifted myself a used camcorder, and from that point on, I haven’t stopped documenting my life (also) in this way. Beyond being an obsession, it is at the same time a filter and a mirror. A filter because it is through and with which I relate to others, to spaces, to events. A mirror because it is with which I relate to myself and my life. I studied Anthropology, and this in turn has greatly influenced my practice. But in a way, I studied Anthropology precisely because I was interested in people’s lives in relation to their world, and I wanted to photograph and film them as they lived their lives—at first, even better if they were distant from my own. The camera as a means of discovery and travel, and of storytelling once I returned home. Then came the shift: I studied Gender Studies and focused on my own world, and on people who were socialized like me and had bodies similar to mine. That’s when intimacy and closeness emerged. And so the camera became an intimate caress in everyday life. Ultimately, the two practices naturally intersect.
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MB: We were making home videos of each other long before there was an aspect of research attached to it. It originated very purely from desire. I was, and continue to be, so captivated by Bianca that I was just desperate to witness her and to save these witnessings and to build a personal archive of these witnessings, almost as a sort of altar, and a place to return to. I wasn’t casually making home movies before I knew Bianca, so for me, it also became a practice unique to our love, and a way to communicate to each other something that existed beyond words. Every time she or I reached for the video camera during a completely normal, every-day moment, it for me was this testament to love itself. So the videos and the practice of recording each other pre-existed the research element. But, that being said, I think that because we both have academic backgrounds in feminist theory (we met while completing our master’s degrees in gender studies), doing research and finding our place in queer-feminist lineages is something we are both drawn to. For me, research and theory give me tools to understand the world and my place in it, from a structural standpoint. So even though the practice pre-existed the research, I feel that our curiosity towards anti-hegemonic, feminist art-making and cinematic theory bolstered our practice and helped me recognize the place that this practice has in a wider weave of lesbianqueertrans feminist practices and methods for art-making and life-making. It also gave me a sense of confidence. The research made my thought turn outwards for the first time, it made me go from thinking that this was a private practice, to recognizing that there was a larger story here, one that had meaning outside of our love, one that not only could be a representation of love, but that could really be a theoretical illustration of the processes of co-constitutive becoming. I think that in most academic fields, the theory and research can become so abstract that even if you “understand” it, sometimes it lacks a tether to the material world. And with this movie, I felt like I was taking our interests in feminist new-materialism (for just one example) and saying, “look! This exists right here! It is in our bedrooms, it is in our love, it is in our gazes, it is in our hands!”
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You mention the legacy of queer lesbian women filmmakers, could you tell us about some of the filmmakers who acted as inspiration for the film?
MB: I think the most obvious one, at least for me, is Barbara Hammer. I don’t think I would have been able to stand and say that this movie is a movie and you should watch it, without Barbara Hammer’s legacy. Her monumental effort to straddle the lines between avant garde art making and portrayals of quotidian lesbian life granted me a permission to do the same and to give validity to my own attempts. Also the low-budgetness, the domestic, play such important roles in her art making process and I felt deeply connected to this, to the project of making for the sense of giving voice to something from our community, not relying on funding, or grants, or applications, but just realizing that sometimes you already have what you need and you don’t have to wait for anyone’s permission. I would also say that her refusal to sideline love has guided me and inspired me. I refuse to uplift the theory, the abstraction, as more important than the love, the sex, the intimacy. Because theory and abstraction come from somewhere, and in this case, they come from these lesbian bodies, and I want that to be very clear. We cannot lose the body and I think Barbara never forgot this.
BA: Obviously Barbara Hammer, the great lesbian filmmaker, the mother of us all. But I have to say one thing about Barbara: her work is so incredible because it’s so tactile and embodied that it’s as if we queer lesbian filmmakers already had it inside us even before we saw it. I saw her work relatively late, when I had already started making short films, and it blew my mind to discover that I was trying to do things she had already done long ago, yet we still feel them vibrating on our skin. Other major inspirations were Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman. Then there’s Derek Jarman—not a lesbian filmmaker, but definitely queer—with his Super 8 films; his is the phrase “home videos as an offering of paradises to one another.”
MB: I think the most obvious one, at least for me, is Barbara Hammer. I don’t think I would have been able to stand and say that this movie is a movie and you should watch it, without Barbara Hammer’s legacy. Her monumental effort to straddle the lines between avant garde art making and portrayals of quotidian lesbian life granted me a permission to do the same and to give validity to my own attempts. Also the low-budgetness, the domestic, play such important roles in her art making process and I felt deeply connected to this, to the project of making for the sense of giving voice to something from our community, not relying on funding, or grants, or applications, but just realizing that sometimes you already have what you need and you don’t have to wait for anyone’s permission. I would also say that her refusal to sideline love has guided me and inspired me. I refuse to uplift the theory, the abstraction, as more important than the love, the sex, the intimacy. Because theory and abstraction come from somewhere, and in this case, they come from these lesbian bodies, and I want that to be very clear. We cannot lose the body and I think Barbara never forgot this.
BA: Obviously Barbara Hammer, the great lesbian filmmaker, the mother of us all. But I have to say one thing about Barbara: her work is so incredible because it’s so tactile and embodied that it’s as if we queer lesbian filmmakers already had it inside us even before we saw it. I saw her work relatively late, when I had already started making short films, and it blew my mind to discover that I was trying to do things she had already done long ago, yet we still feel them vibrating on our skin. Other major inspirations were Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman. Then there’s Derek Jarman—not a lesbian filmmaker, but definitely queer—with his Super 8 films; his is the phrase “home videos as an offering of paradises to one another.”
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Your portrayal of yourselves in the film is fiercely intimate, making it a truly collaborative piece of work, how did you go about writing and editing the film together?
BA: I fell in love with Moss in a university classroom where we were pursuing a master’s degree in Gender Studies, and I’d say our first declarations of love were our theoretical arguments, woven with quotes and references. That’s why it feels to me like we started writing Luminous Matter right then and there. Shortly after, I started filming her as a way to stay close to her in the way that felt most natural to me, but also to have something of her when we were apart. And at some point, she took my camera and started filming me too, which made me fall even more in love with her. Then a dear friend sent me an open call for the cinema issue of Almanac—Journal of Trans Poetics, and Moss and I decided we would write it together. Writing together was one of the most intense things we’ve ever done, cutting and dismantling each other’s sentences until they became a single entity in which we could barely tell who had written one line and who the other. Then, with that article, we decided we wanted to participate in the Lesbian Lives conference; however, as artists—and interdisciplinary ones —it seemed absurd to us to present an article on our home-video practice without bringing our home videos, and that’s where the embryo of Luminous Matter came from: in a small room in Brighton, in our drag costumes, we took turns reading our text while our home movies played behind us. And then, well, it was already a film. MB: This is a messy process. It is messy because it is so intimate. The actual making of the film and essay, the actual sitting down and writing with each other, editing each other’s sentences and re-phrasing each other’s ideas and cutting and editing each other’s shots is much more intimate (for me) than being filmed. It is incredibly vulnerable and it demands that you offer a lot of yourself, without certainty. That you offer yourself to be changed, built-with and contaminated by. It is messy. It is not messy in a bad way, but messy because collaboration is messy and I think there needs to be space for a lot of mess before refining. I think firstly, the beautiful messiness of working-together is fed by the fact that we have very different styles of working and thinking and making. I can tend towards control and over-explanation and Bianca has brought me away from this in a way that is very generative for me. I think that it is also very important to honor each other’s strengths while still working together on a foundational level and trying to uplift each other in the places that we feel less confident in. For example, I think that Bianca has a strength in editing and directing on a visual level that I am just now beginning to hone. So although my impulse would always be to defer to her in questions of the visual, she would resist this, and work to uplift my visions and impulses and to honor them and to help me try to give form to what I was imagining, even if this meant that she was also helping me to learn editing software. I always felt as though she was equipping me with tools to become a better artist, beyond just collaborating to make this movie. I think (I hope) that the same is true in the writing. I think that I have a strong editorial standpoint and I really enjoy editing written texts, and whereas I tend to approach writing as a process of explaining, Bianca’s brain works in this magical way that is so complex and evocative and doesn’t necessarily prioritize explanation. And so, I always tried to uplift this more illustrative method of writing, even as it challenged me. But to give you a practical answer, the process involves a lot of shared google docs, where we probably wrote 3 or 5 times more than what you heard, or what even made it to the expanded version of the essay in print. It involved spending a lot of time writing and re-writing, trying to understand each other and play with each other. It involved playing around, a lot. But also by the end, I no longer remembered who had written which sentences, which is actually an amazing feeling. I feel that, even now, looking at the essay and the voice over, the question of who originated what thoughts is rather obsolete, because it really is co-created. In terms of the editing of the movie, again, it involved a lot of time spent sitting side by side, first going through a lot of our archives, pulling out shots and images that we loved, ones that we felt were interesting or fun or just particularly juicy. And then it became a slow journey through sequences and images, each of us testing what images our impulses told us should go where and seeing what worked best. I think this method of collaboration also is a very delicate and beautiful practice, where you begin to listen to your gut, but without a sense of ownership. |
In the film you describe it as an offering to one another, how do you then view the audience and their role in the act of queer, trans, lesbian becoming?
MB: I view the film itself also as an offering to the audience. Of course it originates as an offering to each other, but I also see it as a piece of autotheory that we are offering for people to read and locate themselves within. On another level, the movie deals with this question of becoming, and how becoming yourself is not something you do alone. You need the gaze of the other to be you, you need the intra-action between bodies in order to be your unique body. And so for me, each audience becomes another player in the intra-action, where the way that the audience sees the movie, and therefore sees me, offers me a new element that is added into the way that I see myself, which then turns into not just how I see myself, but how I materially am. For instance, outside of the particulars of this movie, I try to move away from models of identity that are all about the self, the individual and the label. I am much more interested in a version of identity that is shaped through how I move through the world and how the world interacts with me. And I think this movie also experiments in this by bringing the audience into the game, because not totally, but in part, I am how I am witnessed by those who choose to witness me. On a more practical level, I want the audience to feel that they are being brought into this line of flight and given an invitation to see their own processes in the same way. Like, I would be very happy if people left a screening of this movie with the impulse to go play dress up with their partner(s) or friend(s) or child or mother, etc. I would be very happy if the audience, if nothing else, left a screening with the desire to make long eye-contact with their beloveds.
BA: It is a process of becoming-other through the gaze and narratives of others. A becoming through and with the other, in our love and in our making art together, yet never disconnected from the world, from the trees and flowers and streets, and from the friends, mothers, and artists we love. And this is also what we want to offer. That the viewer may dive into our intimacy and thus experience their own, letting themselves be carried away by the words that cradle it and crossing into the blur of our lips to find the taste of their own and of their lover. But also a political act in which to recognize oneself: to offer one’s own queer domesticity as something real that exists but eludes the dominant gaze, and that is often condemned. And so to offer each other paradises and offer them to the public, so that they may see their own. Because we live and love intensely.
MB: I view the film itself also as an offering to the audience. Of course it originates as an offering to each other, but I also see it as a piece of autotheory that we are offering for people to read and locate themselves within. On another level, the movie deals with this question of becoming, and how becoming yourself is not something you do alone. You need the gaze of the other to be you, you need the intra-action between bodies in order to be your unique body. And so for me, each audience becomes another player in the intra-action, where the way that the audience sees the movie, and therefore sees me, offers me a new element that is added into the way that I see myself, which then turns into not just how I see myself, but how I materially am. For instance, outside of the particulars of this movie, I try to move away from models of identity that are all about the self, the individual and the label. I am much more interested in a version of identity that is shaped through how I move through the world and how the world interacts with me. And I think this movie also experiments in this by bringing the audience into the game, because not totally, but in part, I am how I am witnessed by those who choose to witness me. On a more practical level, I want the audience to feel that they are being brought into this line of flight and given an invitation to see their own processes in the same way. Like, I would be very happy if people left a screening of this movie with the impulse to go play dress up with their partner(s) or friend(s) or child or mother, etc. I would be very happy if the audience, if nothing else, left a screening with the desire to make long eye-contact with their beloveds.
BA: It is a process of becoming-other through the gaze and narratives of others. A becoming through and with the other, in our love and in our making art together, yet never disconnected from the world, from the trees and flowers and streets, and from the friends, mothers, and artists we love. And this is also what we want to offer. That the viewer may dive into our intimacy and thus experience their own, letting themselves be carried away by the words that cradle it and crossing into the blur of our lips to find the taste of their own and of their lover. But also a political act in which to recognize oneself: to offer one’s own queer domesticity as something real that exists but eludes the dominant gaze, and that is often condemned. And so to offer each other paradises and offer them to the public, so that they may see their own. Because we live and love intensely.
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Bianca Arnold (Turin, 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher with degrees in anthropology and gender studies. Her work ranges from installations to video art, writing, and painting. A solo exhibition of her work (I Bambini del Compost) opened in 2022 in Bologna. She has also published several articles on queerness and cinema. Bianca has directed several short films, including di vento e di voci (of wind and voices) (2024), co-directed with Giuliana Zungri, and Vogliamo Una Vita Bella (We Want A Beautiful Life) (2025). She is currently attending the documentary filmmaking course at CSC, the Italian national film school. She collaborates with Sicilia Queer Film Fest and is part of Sbaraglio Cinema, independent film collective in Palermo.
Moss Berke (New York, 1995) is a writer, researcher, and multidisciplinary artist who is situated in the expansive intersection of gender studies and environmental humanities. Her research and arts practice bring together fiber arts, poetry, video, landart, tattooing, collective activism, and performance. Her work creates experiments with themes of loss, grief, and desire, more-than-human intimacies, and non-normative temporalities. Most recently, Moss co-curated an exhibition, Limbo, which mobilized de-colonial and queer theory to approach the entangled world of wetlands. Moss' articles and poems can be found in Almanac Journal of Trans* Poetics, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies, LagoonScapes Journal of Environmental Humanities, Soapbox Journal of Cultural Analysis, and elsewhere. Bianca and Moss have been a creative duo since 2023, and in 2025 they inaugurated their installation/performance “Proximity Rehearsal” at Galleria Rollò in Palermo, which was then presented in October 2025 at the Lesbian Lives Conference in New York City. They live and work in Palermo, Italy. |
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