Laura Larson

Electric Girls and the Invisible World

Introduction
In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of
unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the author faithfully
reports what is going on in his imagination.
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Writing, for an artist, is viewed as a sidelinea support for the primary creative activity,
whether its a journal entry or an artist statement. When beginning to develop the video
Electric Girls and the Invisible World, my desire to write exceeded the task of support.
Writing itself became an important aspect of the project, essential in engaging a
discussion about how history is written, be it through a photograph or a text. This
documentI see it as equal parts artist statement, essay, and shooting scriptis meant to
frame the conceptual structure of the project. Its bastardized form echoes the aesthetic
and conceptual strategies of the video.
From 2003-05, I produced three, interrelated photographic projects, which take as their
point of departure the issues raised by spirit photographythe practice of recording
paranormal phenomenaand its relevance to contemporary photography. In Ectoplasm,
a series of small black and white photographs, I re-stage historical photographs of
sances from the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, often performing the role of the
medium. I first encountered Eusapia Palladino in my research for this work.
Palladino was born in Puglia, Italy in 1854 and lived as an adult in Naples. After
discovering her paranormal abilities as a teenager, she became an internationally
renowned medium who traveled extensively in Europe, to perform her phenomena. Her
audiences extended beyond spiritualist circles due to the spectacular nature of her
sances, including astronomer Camille Flamarrion, criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and
scientists Pierre and Marie Curie. Tables would levitate; musical instruments would play
of their own accord and fly through the air; mysterious knocks would be heard from
invisible hands. While in trance, she described her erotic encounters with invisible
lovers, brought to her by the spirits. Often times, the sance would culminate with
Palladino ecstatically throwing herself upon a male participant. Her phenomena were
subjected to continual testing in the cause of scientific research, an element that
undoubtedly contributed to the drama of her demonstrations. Like all physical mediums
of this era, she was routinely photographed in an effort to provide evidence of her gifts
or, in some cases, to expose her as a fraud. Her sances were the focus of intense public
scrutiny and great controversy, with her exploits regularly reported in newspapers.
Palladino avowed her gifts, endlessly promoted them, but would perversely admit when
she duped her audiences. An illiterate peasant who found herself among the affluent
society of European spiritualists, she asserted an independence and sexuality both striking
and unusual in the Victorian era.
I was drawn to Palladinos story for several reasons. Beyond its fascinating details, it
presents a reprimand to the ambitions of the lower classesa cautionary tale of success.
Its conventions are easily recognized: the humble beginnings, the ingenuity of talent, the
meteoric rise, and the fall from grace. In 1895, a committee formed by the British
Society of Psychical Research discredited Palladino, after a series of sances held in
Cambridge. Widely believed to be the deathblow to her reputation, she stage-managed a
comeback by resourcefully subverting the terms of authentification. A quintessentially
postmodern subject, Palladino simultaneously proclaimed the legitimacy of her powers
but when caught, acknowledged that she cheated. She staked her reputation on delivering
her phenomena and if the spirits were uncooperative, resorting to trickery was simply a
means to hold up her end of the bargain. In her eyes, truth and deceit were not mutually
exclusive. But, the inevitable was merely postponed. During her trip to New York in
1908, her cheating was so brazen that it seemed to almost defy her investigators,
audiences already determined to finally put an end to her career. She returned home
extremely bitter by the contemptuous American reception. She was fifty-four years old
and it was widely believed that her powers had left her. Although the narrative is
familiar one, the charismatic force of her insubordination undermines its message.
Biography
The project began initially as a search for photographs of Palladino. Significantly, while
there are many references to efforts to photograph her, only a handful of these original
prints remain. Many are reproduced in books and journal articles. In these images, it is
easy to see the signs of crude manual retouching, their marred transparency. These
images exist for me in Xeroxed form and I present them in this context, through digital
scanning, yet another generation removed. Walter Benjamin imagined the democratizing
impact of mechanical reproduction and its potential to transform the practice and
reception of art. Yet, in a slight re-working of Benjamins thesis, this linear chain of
reproduction suggests a conceptual knot particular to the project of historical biography.
As I learned more about Palladino, my grasp of her became increasingly tenuous.

Its difficult to imagine that this image represents a measured attempt to conduct and
photographically record a sance. The crowd is comically large, with eleven participants,
staring intently in the direction of the medium. The close cropping of the image further
intensifies the claustrophobic character of the setting. Palladinos head peeks out of the
sance cabinet, a receding point in this domesticated landscape. Whats striking about
the photograph is her peripheral role in this theatrical tableau. Seated the furthest away
from the camera, she recedes as a bit player, partially concealed by the curtains.
Logistical considerations conspire to marginalize her in a situation where she is in fact
the very reason for its occasion.
This image possesses all the material cues of photographic evidence. The harsh flash of
the camera freezes a table, mid-levitation, obscuring Palladino from view. One of the
participants, a woman, turns towards the camera with a blank look of confusion; her
attention appears torn between the photographer and the table. The dearly sought
levitationthe photographic prizeagain eclipses Palladino. These photographs belie a
curious aspect of the Palladino archive. She emerges only as a fragment in the picture, a
specter of her own story.
If in photographs Palladino hangs in the wings as an elusive figure, textual accounts of
her character present overwhelmingly vivid representations of her, images that verge on
hyperbole. M. Arthur Levys account, detailing his experience of a sance organized by
Camille Flammarion, invokes the image of the passionate Italian woman:
Two things arrest the attention when you look at her. First, her large eyes, filled
with strange fire, sparkle in their orbits, or, again, seem filled with swift gleams of
phosphorescent fire, sometimes bluish, sometimes golden. If I did not fear that
the metaphor was too easy when it concerns a Neapolitan woman, I should say
that her eyes appear like the glowing lava fires of Vesuvius, seen from a distance
in a dark night. The other peculiarity is a mouth with strange contours. We do
not know whether it expresses amusement, suffering or scorn.
In his book, After Death, What?, Cesare Lombroso devotes long passages to character
study:
But she is not without morbid characteristics, which sometimes extend to streaks
of insanity. She passes rapidly from joy to grief, has strange phobias (for example
the fear of staining her hands), is extremely impressionable and subject to dreams,
in spite of her mature age. Not rarely she has hallucinations, frequently sees her
own ghost. As a child she believed two eyes glared at her behind trees and
hedges.
Palladino isnt brought to life in these texts but rather, rendered as slightly unreal, an
impression consistent through lay accounts, scientific reports, and newspaper articles.
When the descriptions entail her sances, she becomes an even stranger figure. Dr.
Ercole Chiaia describes her during a sitting in 1888, in an open letter to Lombroso:
She is like an India rubber doll, like an automaton of a new kind; she takes
strange forms. How many legs and arms has she? We do not know. While her
limbs are being held by incredulous spectators, we see other limbs coming into
view, without her knowing where they come from. Her shoes are too small to fit
these witch-feet of hers, and this particular circumstance gives rise to the
suspicion of the intervention of mysterious power.
The instability of her body, expanding and sprouting appendages, is reminiscent of an
impatient sitter for a portrait. Its as if she cant hold still for the camera.
These accounts to a contemporary audience easily lend themselves to parody, betraying a
categorical revulsion of her gender, class and ethnicity. In spite of this, they fascinated
and repelled me in equal measure. Her overwhelming presence in these descriptions
sounds like noise; sentient details emerge but then recede in the hysteria of the prose.
The excessive prose foreground the authors subjectivities but, like the photographs,
obscure their subject. When considering these texts alongside the images, Palladinos
paranoia of being watched, described by Lombroso, seems the epitome of reason.
I was pulled between these two extremes in the documentation and bewildered by their
opacity. Like the image of the startled sance participant, I didnt know where to look.
As an artist, Im not held to the same standards of transparency applied to historians and
journalists. Knowing this didnt stem the undertow of the facts, which pulled on a
strange sense of duty to Palladino. Producing a project about an historical figure seemed
an organic step in the development of my work, consistent with my interest in a critique
of photographys assumed evidentiary status. These contentious artifacts, in a sense,
failed as representations and I found myself at an impasse in the translation of historical
facts into photographic fiction.
Autobiography
So, I looked away from the facts. I recognized that my attraction to Eusapia stemmed
from a fascination with the paranormal that dated to my childhood. To say that I
obsessively read ghost stories as a kid is an understatement. My bookshelf looked like
the library of a budding paranoiac, or psychical researcher, depending on your view of
paranormal phenomena. My reading extended to the subjects of extrasensory perception,
witchcraft, supernatural creatures and extraterrestrial life. I read anything and everything
that suggested there were forces beyond my experience of the world, in hopes that they
could account for my perception of it. Although these stories terrified me, I also found
the notion that a ghost could exert power in the world of the living incredibly seductive.
My desire to magically transform myself, and my surroundings, preoccupied my fantasies
and this literature proved a refuge for my imaginary life. But, the allure of the
paranormal was a ferociously private matter. To commit this disclosure to paper even
now feels like Im giving up a precious secret, an embarrassing admission of the
powerlessness I felt at that age.
While I have no interest in producing an explicitly biographical work, I want to
acknowledge this fascination in the project and imagine its resonance in the experience of
young girls. In The Externalization of Motive Power, Albert de Rochas book on
Palladino, there is an addendum on poltergeist phenomena where he names the pre-
adolescents who are the focus of poltergeist phenomena as electric girls, categorizing
them as provisional mediums. Poltergeist activity typically ceases once a girl has reached
sexual maturation and she has been appropriately socialized. The unruly nature of the
poltergeist, whether as a supernatural force or a psychological symptom, presented a
tremendously appealing screen to examine the historical case of Palladino. The electric
girls leveraged the weight of the historical research so that I could position myself,
however obliquely, in my re-invention of Palladinos story.
Project Description
Electric Girls and The Invisible World encompasses two distinct projects. I am
producing a series of black and white photographs based on historical records on
Palladino. These archival drawings, photographs and written accounts depict her
extraordinary and inexplicable acts. My photographs will recreate scenes based on my
research, while others will playfully and self-consciously depart from these records.
Significantly, the special effects for these images are staged using analog methods.
While digital technology gives the artist tools to seamlessly create documents such as
these, it doesnt have the evidentiary weight that analog images command. With their
low-tech staging, the images draw upon the performative aspects of analog technology.
Incorporated into the video, the photographs will be presented as archival documents.
The series will be both a discreet body of work and a central visual element of the video.
Despite her astonishing claims and those of her credulous followers, Palladino was
repeatedly caught in acts of fraud and rebuked by spiritualists and non-believers alike.
Historical accounts and their contemporary readings are deeply and divisively split over
the authenticity of her phenomena. This uncertainty mirrors a central conceptual
dilemma of contemporary photography. Notions of the real and the staged continue to
inform discussions about the terms that define the medium as an art form. The
assumption of objectivitythe desire to trust our eyescontinues to haunt photography.
I look at Palladino as I look at photographs, with both skepticism and desire. In this same
vein, Electric Girls and the Invisible World will frame Palladino as a historical subject of
great ambivalence and longing.
Rather than rely on the methods of documentary, the video will critically engage its
conventions to present her storys significance to contemporary feminist critiques of
history and representation, through the performances of the electric girls. I will
organize a summer theater workshop for girls, which will function as a production lab for
the film. For the cast, I will have a core group of five actors but I am open to the group
being larger or perhaps in flux, with members coming and going. The video will be a
hybrid of scripted actions and dialogue with improvisation. The script is based on
historical accounts of her sances culled from newspaper articles, spiritualist publications
and scientific reports. Divided into chapters, each section will begin with a photograph,
which will serve as a point of departure for the improvisational scenes with the electric
girls. Narration of the various historical accounts of Palladino will be structured into the
scripts dialogue but the girls will essentially play themselves. Palladino will function as
an unorthodox model of feminine power for the electric girls. Through a series of
sances, levitations, and Ouija Board sessions, the girls will speak for her, embodying her
perspective by pitting her/their voices against the appropriated or fictive historical
records. The video will also include scenes of the girls, exploring their own nascent
powers in a series of spectacular displays. Through these acts of identification, the
electric girls will project a complex and contradictory portrait of Palladino. Electric
Girls and the Invisible World will pose historical biography as a medium determined by
the desires of its authors.
While her investigators cast her as an ignorant peasant, Palladino was a woman of
remarkable ingenuity and sophistication, possessing an enormous amount of power for a
woman in the Victorian era, whether her powers were real or not. The electric girls
are at the cusp of pubertyan age of enormous emotional, physical and social change.
Girls at this age possess a confidence that slightly older adolescents often struggle to
maintain. Palladino herself was twelve years old when she first began to exhibit her
uncanny powers. It is this combination of innocence and self-possession, which make the
electric girls the ideal actors to portray Palladino.
Script Excerpts
The Invisible World
Pitch black. There is the sound of hands clapping and knuckles rapping on wood, but
with no discernible rhythm. The notes of musical instrumentsa piano, a violin, a
bellsound single notes, then go quiet. Voices whisper. All sounds begin to increase in
number and volume. The sounds are distinguishable at first but quickly build to a
crescendo.
The scene slowly illuminates in proportion to the crescendo of sound. A group of five
girls, seated in plain wood chairs, sit in a circle in a darkened room. They are holding
hands and breathing together in unison. The viewer can only see the backs of their heads,
and the tops of their backs. The stillness of their movement contrasts with the clatter of
sound. On the back of the wall, hangs a crude sign: cut-out letters dangling on string,
spelling THE ELECTRIC GIRLS. This scene is based on an iconic spirit photograph,
depicting the textual ectoplasm from a sance, photographed by Thomas Glendinning
Hamilton in 1931.

The scene dims to black and the sound fades to silence.
Eusapia (voiceover, in Italian): Non so dove finisco ed il mondo inizia.
Subtitle: I dont know where I end and the world begins.
Electric Girl (voiceover): This is the story of Eusapia Palladino.
Levitations
Photograph: Close-up of Eusapias hands, tips poised on the surface of a sance table.
Reproducing a promotional image, the image will depict her hands surrounded with a
stylized Victorian graphic frame with a text proclaiming The Powerful Hands of
Madame Palladino.
A kitchen. The girls are eating Amaretti di Saronno cookies and commence to play the
wish game. After eating a cookie, each takes the light tissue that wraps it and forms a
fragile cylinder. Placing the cylinder on the surface of a table, they pause and silently
make a wish. Taking turns, each girl lights the paper with a match and watches as the fire
burns down then lifts the paper high into the air. There is no scripted dialogue for this
scene.
During this scene, a male narrator will authoritatively intone fragments of Palladinos
story. The sound of the narrator will occasionally fade, or abruptly cut out, and the
ambient noise of the girls will rise up to fill these gaps.
Male narrator (voiceover): Eusapia Palladinos early life was one marked by tragedy.
Her mother died shortly after childbirth and she was orphaned at twelve years old when
her father was murdered by bandits. Little Sapia was taken in by a family in Naples as a
charity case, with the expectation that she would eventually earn her keep as a domestic.
With her arrival, a series of unexplained incidents occurred. The family, out of curiosity,
formed a circle one evening as a trial to test her. Within ten minutes, the marvelous
began.
These humble beginnings should have guaranteed her the prosaic life of a professional
medium, scrabbling for a living by charging for her paranormal services. Eusapias
wonders came to the attention of the spiritualist community, eager to find evidence of
survival after death. She went from being a local attraction to an internationally
renowned medium. Under the influence of her spirit control, the buccaneer John King,
her fantastical phenomena captivated learned men who sought to unlock the secrets of the
human soul. She traveled extensively throughout Europe, submitting herself to the
scrutiny of psychical researchers. But, she had many detractors, claiming she was only a
fraud who played on the ingenuousness of her audiences. Even those convinced of her
powers, noted that she was quick to cheat if the opportunity was present.
Eusapia (voiceover): Tutti I mediums truccanotutti! E non poi tanto facile di
accorgersene, lo dico per esperienza personale.
Subtitle: All mediums trick-all! And it is not so easy to catch them. I say this from
personal experience.
First Sance
Photograph: Eusapia levitating a sance table
The Electric Girls are gathered around a sance table. The scene will take place in the
same set where I stage the fake Palladino documentation. They take turns reciting the
following section, switching seats around the table, and performing improvised actions.
The Electric Girls: Several participants are seated around a table, with Eusapia at the
head. The sance cabinet is situated behind her, a space partitioned off with curtains. It
is in this enclosure that the spiritual fluid is believed to gather and issue as physical
materializations. Great attention is taken to insure the security of the cabinet and to
safeguard against fraud, whether through confederate aid or an apparatus rigged by the
medium. In the cabinet, different items are placed on a small table and these objects will
often come forth once the sance is underway. All hold hands to form a circle. Eusapias
hands and feet are restrained, held by participants on her left and right sides, a measure
taken to prevent any attempts at deception. She strictly dictates the conditions of the
sance, ordering the lights to be dimmed or raised at crucial junctures. Most remarkable
is that she announces the phenomena in advance: Now I will bring forth the
guitarnow the table will rise As she nears a trance state, she begins to hiccup
violently, signaling the approach of her control John King. In trance, while she is under
his control, her most remarkable phenomena occur, often at a dizzying pace. When she
wakes from her trance, Eusapia will throw herself upon the nearest male participant,
showering them in kisses. These displays are the unfortunate cause of great discomfort to
all participants, especially the ladies.
The scene cuts to a slow motion film sequence of Eusapia levitating the table. A bright
blaze of lightthe flash bulb on the cameramakes the image bleed to white.
Ouija Board
Photograph: Eusapia tied up in chair
A family den/rec room. The girls are gathered around a Ouija Board on the floor and
they prepare to summon Eusapia.
Electric Girl: Eusapia, are you there?
The girls spell out YES on the Ouija Board.
Electric Girl: Why do you like coming here?
The girls spell out HOMESICK.
Electric Girl: Do you want to send us a message?
The girls spell out DAUGHTERS.
Meet the Electric Girls
Photograph: Formal portrait of Eusapia, shot in a Victorian domestic environment.
Filmed as simple headshots, each of the following texts will be read by one of the five
Electric Girls. Each girl will be filmed at a discrete location. In their delivery, there will
be a tension between modes of rehearsal, when its clear they are reading from a script,
and performance, when their recitation is polished.
Electric Girl #1: In his book The Externalization of Motive Power, Albert de Rochas
connects Palladinos supernormal marvels with the phenomena of provisional
mediumspre-adolescent girls that he refers to as electric girls. He reports the
anecdotal details of several cases of unexplained phenomena seemingly involving animal
electricity. What follows are briefings of several cases:
Electric Girl #2: Flames appeared at the fingertips of a girl named Faun Y., aged twelve,
as she caressed the face of her infant brother. The sparks measured 3 cm long. Her
mother reported the incident to the local physician and then sent the girl to live with a
distant relation.
Electric Girl #3: Angelique B., a thirteen year old described as possessing little
intelligence, had the gift of pushing objects away from herself with an invisible force of
energy. Her control of the phenomena was extremely limited. Passing through a room,
furniture flew away from her by the mere brush of her skirts.
Electric Girl #4: The skirts of Honorine S. were seen to balloon up in moments of intense
emotional experience. During a particularly acrimonious argument with her sister,
crackling sounds accompanied these movements. She was fourteen years old at the time
of the incidents. The witness was a brilliant professor of one of the Royal Colleges of
Paris.
Electric Girl #5: De Rochas reports the duration of the phenomena ranged from one
month to five years and in all cases, eventually ceased, either suddenly or over an
extended interval of time. He urges, in the interest of science, further research of these
electric girls, to unravel the basis of their strange and wondrous displays.
Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather
Photograph: Eusapia levitating bell
Girls bedroom. The girls will play Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather. A great deal
of attention will be devoted to the ritualistic preparation of the scenelighting candles,
careful review of protocol, pleas for concentration, shushing of giggles, etc. Taking
turns, the girls will attempt to levitate each member of the group. There is no scripted
dialogue for this scene.
During this scene, a male narrator will intone chapters of Palladinos story. The sound of
the narrator will occasionally fade, or abruptly cut out, and the ambient noise of the girls
will rise up to fill these gaps.
Male narrator (voiceover): If her propensity for cheating wasnt disturbing enough, her
libidinous nature truly distressed her advocates. During trance, Eusapia received
invisible lovers, brought to her by the spirits and she narrated these encounters with
alarming detail.
This passage should be followed by a longer ambient sequence.
Eusapia (voiceover): Posso usare tutta la forza, tutte le forze, e non posso mai fare niente
di valore a che c' meno la comprensione intorno me.
Subtitle: I may use all my strength, all my forces, and I can never do anything
worthwhile unless there is sympathy around me. (New York Times)
Electric Girl: Could genuine phenomena be produced by a self-proclaimed fraud? Was
Eusapia a faker who was for real?
Naming the Powers
Photograph: A head and shoulders portrait of Eusapia with the disembodied arm of a
child reaching around her neck.
Improvisation: What powers do you wish you possessed, whether ordinary or fantastic?
Why?
The Electric Girls are ambling along a path in the woods and they will eventually arrive
at a cabin. During the course of their hike, a conversation ensues about their powers.
They egg each other on in the conversation. The powers range from the magical to the
everyday. While the conversation may seem initially competitive, they are creating a
catalog of sorts. Their excitement grows with each new power named and added to this
imaginary archive:
I can fly.
I can make my brother disappear.
I can make my hair grow faster.
I can get straight As.
I can slip through keyholes.
I can hear when people talk about me.
The scene ends with a still image. It is the interior of a cabin with several bunk beds.
Each girl levitates about a foot above her bed. Its as if they were all asleep and then
began to rise, in unison. This is the only image in the film that will be produced using
Photoshop. This difference will be conspicuous in relationship to the analog production
of the video and photographs special effects.
Walking on Water
Photograph: Eusapia with points of light floating around her head.
In this scene, the girls will be filmed at a lake, where it will appear that they are walking
on water. Placing ironing boards in the shallow depths of the lake so the board is
submerged just below the surface of the water will create this special effect, and the girls
will stand on the surface of the boards. The boards will be scattered around the site. The
girls will form a group by virtue of their miraculous feats but each will remain absorbed
in their own private reverie. I would like for this scene to be as mundane as possible,
with onlookers nonplussed by the girls magic.
Male narrator (voiceover): We are not now concerned with the Eusapia of dark
mediumistic cabinets, amidst the sobbing and whispering, the mystery of hands, of
dancing tables, of resounding raps; but the Eusapia of daylight, who, free from the
paternal shade of John, returns to her normal personality as an ordinary and altogether
uneducated woman of the very lowest populace.
The sound of the narrator will occasionally fade, or abruptly cut out, and the ambient
noise of the scene will rise up to fill these gaps.