“Circle Burn,” a 4-minute artist film, explores the tactility of emotion through a feminist poetics. A woman in a white dress slowly performs a ritual in front of a small bonfire on a densely foggy day at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California. The ritual includes laying out and burning a dried bouquet of flowers, as well as breathing, resting, walking, and using a stick to mark a circle in the sand around the fire. In the multi-channel audio narration, the artist reads a text that meanders through the aesthetics, tactility, and multisensorial aspects of emotion. The narrative style takes an active stance against classical narrativist directionality and instead offers the poetics of the body and the landscape, both which appear fragmented. This film considers the tactility of fog and smoke alongside the tactility of emotion, suggesting its atmosphere and opacity may be a more accurate reflection of the embodied experience of emotion as opposed to the imagined clarity demanded of the female subject. The work is body-based and somatic, and critically engages with feminist issues such as unpaid emotional labor, performative femininity, struggles for power and agency, and hyper-socialized expressions of emotions such as rage.

Film crew @2223_media
Justin Wong @justin_22.23
Eli CR
Becket Schroeder

Photos, hair, and makeup by Carissa Diaz