A Story About the Old Fat Girl. Notes on the Cruel and Evil Bull

• 4’40”
• 2019

Alina Kleytman’s extended project “A Story about the Old Fat Girl” constructs a layered narrative of the eponymous Old Fat Girl who lives in a world populated by subversively archetypal figures, such as the Dumb Angry Bull, the Sharp-Nose Angry Beast or the Small Old Bitch. By employing and distorting storytelling strategies, Kleytman constructs a perplexing tale of traumas and psychological violence. The storytelling in |Chapter 5: Notes on the Dumb Angry Bull| casts the archetypal roles in the uncanny staffage, creating an absurdist fable filled with fur and riddled sprats. What is evoked through the story contrasts with the image seen in the video, in which the central figure is hidden from sight and covered with a dirty duvet, resembling a lumpy, amorphous piece of marble yet to be sculpted. The fairy tale speaks of shame and fear, of social and emotional structures propelling into normative roles in the adulthood, as well as those that infantilise and deprive of agency. The sounds of chewing and squelching create the work’s soundscape, suggesting the convergence of compulsion and internalisation and thus bridging the narrative and the depiction.