Resurrect Me as a Parasite, 2025
Directed by Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury (mosquito girlfriend)
Scanned 16mm film, 2K video. 9:52 mins.
Exhibition documentation at Beyond the Commons: From Stardust to Everlasting Sun, A Space Gallery, Toronto, CA.
A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling the binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.
Filmed on 16mm, the work unfolds within the disused ENCI marl quarry in Sint Pietersberg, the Netherlands, and the Magdalene cave of Sainte-Baume Mountain in southern France; a site where Mary Magdalene lived in isolation for the last 30 years of her life following her exile. The film takes inspiration from Langston Hughes poem ‘Tired’ whose beckoning words call to “cut the world in two,” reinterpreting this gesture within an age of extinction. Embracing tropes of eco-horror and exploitation cinema, a sensorial score by John Brennan and Elisa Ferrari drives us through the erotic desire paths of the vampiric; where water, blood, hormones and stone remain transformative, viral, abundant and alive.
Exhibition view of Beyond the Commons: From Stardust to Everlasting Sun, A Space Gallery, Toronto, Canada. Curated by Noor Alé.
Produced by mosquito girlfriend, a film, video and research project by Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury, exploring the political and historical implications of parasitology in relation to colonialism, reproduction and trans, queer and more-than-human life.
Credits
Written and Directed by Lou Lou Sainsbury & Gabi Dao
Performance
Gabi Dao - Tribeca
Max Lester - The Count
Ailo Ribas - Ailo
James Parnell - Vampire Daddy
Cinematography - Lou Lou Sainsbury & Gabi Dao
Additional Insect Macro Cinematography - Hans Smid
Sound, Music and Mixing - John Brennan & Elisa Ferrari
Editing - Lou Lou Sainsbury & Gabi Dao
Colour - Lou Lou Sainsbury
Citations - Tired, Langston Hughes, Uncollected Poems, 1931-1940
Made with generous support from Amarte Fund, Mondriaan Fund, K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation, and donors who wish to remain anonymous.
