WILD FILLY STORY
2020, video, 4k, 20 min loop
Wild Filly Story is starring a pack of adolescent girls on a horse stable, playing out a fictional, yet custom-fit script that prompts questions of friendship, misfit, normativity, fetishization, and female empowerment. A young girl’s horse is taken away to be slaughtered that the horse community later feast on. A filly is a female horse that is too young to be called a mare.
Wild Filly Story takes place on Pony Ranch Floradorp, a therapy and recreation stable in the outskirts of Amsterdam Noord. The casts are regular visitors or workers at the stable. The young girls method-act through stages of agitation, thriving on the artist’s own rural childhood trauma in Sweden, a horsegirl´s obsessions, and her recent short-lived career as a porn film director: teens pulling hair, grand stallions being objectified, food fights, horse healing, and in the backyard of the barn a kissing scene is being made. A red thread through the film is a loose interpretation of a true story from the artist’s own adolescence: a lean, brace-carrying young girl’s horse is taken away to be slaughtered that the horse community later feast on. A ghost—an EMO teen, white-painted, unfitted, potentially dead—grimes her way through a hardcore “gabber” song from the London underground “Drop Dead” with the gang of horse girls as her backing choir. Meanwhile, scenes span from a couple engaged in cliched kissing in the hay (the male part mockingly says “your voice is a bird” borrowing his words from a series of so-called “poem jeans” by denim magnate Levi’s) to a cowgirl talking about a stallion having its balls cut off, giggling through her characterization of its masculine rage being tamed.
Text by Rhea Dall
Installation view solo exhibition UKS, Oslo, Curated by Reha Dall, 2020
Installation view solo exhibition Wild Filly Story at Editorial, Vilnius, Curated by Christina Gigliotti,2021
![]()
![]()
![]()
