Josefin Arnell (SE)

October 2025 - January 2026

‍

Josefin Arnell (b. 1984), lives and works in Amsterdam. Arnell defines a loaded visual language combining anger, desire, disgust and pleasure. Her film work extends to performance, installation, objects, poetry or drawings. She is interested in how storytelling and filmmaking can be used as a form of resistance and as socio-political activity.

‍

At PART, Josefin will develop and shoot a short film. A vampire satire horror drama loosely inspired by Carmilla, an 1872 Gothic novella by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu and a foundational text in the lesbian vampire tradition. The film follows the Gothic tradition of eroticism, decadence, and the anxieties of modernity, satirizing capitalist hunger and the merging of historic aristocracy with contemporary figures obsessed with immortality and longevity. Research for the film includes Vienna’s fin-de-siècle Gothic and Decadent traditions, the 18th-century Habsburg vampire panic, female pirates such as Anne Bonny and Jacquotte Delahaye, and modern beauty entrepreneurs. The work extends from a previous film shot on the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curaçao, during a residency at Instituto Buena Bista where two local vampires feed on tourists.

‍