Hungary – "Affari di Famiglia" by ZimmerFrei
Affari di Famiglia (Family Affairs) by ZimmerFrei is an artistic, documentary and anthropological project that portrays in an original way the "state of the art" of the contemporary family in Italy.
The video work has been selected in Cantica21, the initiative launched jointly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation - MAECI and the Ministry of Culture – MiC that promotes and enhances Italian contemporary art supporting the production of original and unpublished works, exhibiting them worldwide in the Italian Cultural Institutes, Embassies and Consular Offices.
On the occasion of the Contemporary Art Day promoted by AMACI (Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums), the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest has chosen to exhibit Affari di Famiglia, in the selection for double screen in Italian language and subtitled in English, that will run until January 7 in the Xénia Gallery.
The installation consists of two large screens in which more than one hundred video portraits of people of all ages, belonging to family groups of different composition, in territories as diverse as Milan, Cagliari, Rome, and Bologna, are confronted by an equal number of portraits from all over Europe, from France to Hungary, from Portugal to Greece.
The portraits have a precise format: the subjects are placed in their domestic environment and pose for a long duration shot, while the off-screen voice of each of them recounts a family event. The portrayed people keep their eyes closed and appear both absorbed and alert, listening to their own thoughts and the flow of memories, as well as to the sounds coming from the rest of the house or from the screen in front, where other families and other stories are taking place.
From the structure of increasingly disseminated and reticulated families emerges the value of living together as a project for society and community, an invention of everyday life, a sharing of places and a projection into the future. The eternal conflicts and surprising regenerations underlying the family stories are revealed as an inexhaustible source of narrative forms and oral history, making a form of contemporary epos perceptible in its early stages.
Affari di Famiglia has been acquired in the permanent collection of the MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art in Bologna.
