Tiah Trimboli, Helpmann Academy Resident, speaks about the work she has produced during her residency at the BSR ahead of the Summer Open Studios 2025.
Throughout my time in Rome and at the BSR, I aim to develop a Super8 film and photography project that explores the act of moving through a city, using walking as both method and subject. My research is shaped by the tradition of the flâneur – the observer of urban life who wanders aimlessly, absorbing the details of the world – and the historical exclusion of women from this tradition. Building off Lauren Elkin’s book The Flâneuse, which reclaims this figure through the work of female artists, writers, and photographers across the 20th century, I’m particularly interested in what it means to observe and be observed in a public (and foreign) space, and how the act of filming in this space becomes inherently performative too.
It feels funny to me now that before coming to Rome I imagined it would be easy to position myself as a kind of detached observer, documenting the city’s vibrant pockets of culture and chance encounters from a quiet distance. Obviously my first venture out into the city quickly revealed the constant negotiation with bodies, movement and space just to get from one place to another. I realised that walking here isn’t a passive experience at all, and I wouldn’t be able to capture the movement of Rome without also being folded into it.
Thanks to Elkin I’ve come across the works of Ilse Bing, Marianne Breslauer, Dora Maar, Vivian Maier, Sophie Calle and Agnès Varda – women who moved through cities like Paris, Berlin, Venice, and Rome at times when their unaccompanied presence in public was socially and politically charged. A blend of poetic observation and documentary, their photography and films often explored how gender shaped the experience of urban space. You can’t really ignore the heightened attentiveness that comes with being a woman in public. We are both hyper-aware of being watched and carry a stronger instinct for watching in return, tuning in to glances, gestures and unspoken codes.
Whilst developing my own visual relationship to the city, I’ve also been trying to draw from the visual aesthetics of these artists, shooting through glass, working with shadows and reflections, abstracting architecture and crowds and isolating textures and ‘trivial’ objects. I hope my work, in dialogue with Elkin and the artists she brings to light, can capture the sensory and emotional textures of Rome while continuing the thread of the flâneuse – meditating on how identity, visibility and embodied perception shape the way we see and are seen.
