http://www.bridgetbaker.co.za/current-upcoming/
*The Remains of the Father - Fragments of a Trilogy (Transhumance)*
*MAMbo, Bologna 28 October - 6 January
2013<
http://www.mambo-bologna.org/mostre/mostra-98/>
*
film still
2012
2 channel HD projection with audio
duration: 24min
*The Remains of the Father - Fragments of a Trilogy (Transhumance)* is a
two-channel HD video work featuring Lula Teclehaimanot and documents from
the Ellero Archive housed at the The Department of History, Anthropology
and Geography at the University of Bologna and the Archiginnasio Civic
Library.
This work represents the first part in a trilogy in which BB undertakes a
reflective and imaginative journey within hitherto concealed subjects in
contemporary Italian historiography and that country’s education system;
that of Italian colonial history in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The work is the result of a residence programme undertaken by BB in Bologna
during the course of 2011/12 on the invitation of Nosadella.due –
Independent Residency for Public Art. During this period BB developed her
project through various explorations of Italy’s archives and libraries,
meeting with historians, cinema experts, a psychologist, a sociologist,
architects, a writer, a political researcher, and a restaurant owner – from
whom emerged a critical point of view on the subject of Italian colonial
hegemony and its legacy in Italy and Eritrea. Recovering traces recorded in
the official history – from propaganda cinema to the official
correspondence preserved in the archives of the Foreign Affairs Ministry in
Rome – together with fragments of the experiences of private individuals –
drawn from conversations, literary travel accounts and diaries – BB has put
together a hybrid vision which she considers has “many voices, but none
that can tell the whole story on its own”.
Through *The Remains of the Father – Fragments of a Trilogy (Transhumance)*
BB reveals the complexity of the historic reconstruction. Using fictional
and imaginative reconstruction, the film considers the case of a Bolognese
couple Giovanni Ellero (1910-1942) and Maria Pia Pezzoli (1905-1995) who
lived in Italian East Africa in the first half of the 20th century during
Ellero’s employment as a clerk in Eritrea and Ethiopia at the Ministry of
Italian Africa between 1936 and 1941. Ellero conducted ethnographic studies
within Eritrea, collecting and collating cultural documents such as
proverbs, genealogical reports, maps, family seals and personal letters
which offer significant in-roads into historical, anthropological and
linguistic research into the Italian colonial African project.
The film is shot entirely in Bologna at “Villaggio Bandiera”, inside a
derelict semi-detached house built for retired high ranking army officers
during the Fascist era. Within the semi-detached is a set construction of
the imagined colonial office of Giovanni Ellero. This room frames the
narrative through a slow tracing of actions that occur within, conflating
the experiential present with the posthumous “find”. The protagonist, a
young Eritrean researcher, Lula Teclehaimanot has been tasked by the
municipality of Asmara’s department of Public Works to translate from
Amharic into Tigryna: *A contribution to the birth of the colonial style*,
an as yet unpublished manuscript promoting the rationale of the
architectural Modernist Ethiopian Vernacular, written by Ellero in the late
1930s.
The fictional narrative soon becomes fragmented, drifting in and out of
rational audibility, when Lula begins tracing Ellero’s archive while
listening to a radio interview conducted in Italian, Tigryna and Amharic
about the contemporary relevance of proverbs in Eritrean and Ethiopian
societies. Time too is lengthened by slow and protracted shots while a
nonspatial continuum is presented in the light changes from daytime to
evening. Lula’s own family history becomes traceable through her reading of
Ellero’s archive, by way of a family tree and the Teclehaimanot family
seal, collated by Ellero before she was born.
Through experiencing these thresholds of real and imagined knowledge -
through the found document, transmitted language and interpretation; the
past is recalled, and elements of forgotten history are leveraged back into
contemporary history-making, offering relational views on the reading of
history and the creation of knowledge.
Spoken languages are Tigryna, Amharic and Italian.
Special thanks to the collaboration with the Bologna City Council – Housing
Services Sector. Set-design support by GArBo (giovani architetti bologna),
MC A-Mario Cucinella Architects, and Delta-bo Project. The Department of
History, Anthropology and Geography at the University of Bologna and the
Archiginnasio Civic Library generously loaned the original Ellero Archive
to BB for the duration of the shoot. Museum installation support by
Articolture and GArBo (giovani architetti bologna).
Produced by Nosadella.due and Official BB Projects in association with
Articolture thanks to the support of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di
Bologna.
The MAMbo presentation of *The Remains of the Father* is presented in
conjunction with the *Gender Bender
Festival*<
http://www.genderbender.it/eng/dettaglio.asp?id=476> from
27 October - 3 November.
*links*
*Roots-Routes periodical (Research on Visual Cultures) in
italian*<
http://www.roots-routes.org/?p=6084>
*Nosadelladue residency*<
http://www.nosadelladue.com/showartisti_eng.asp?id=123>
Received on Tue Dec 18 2012 - 11:33:28 EST
