with Jennifer rosa
concept and realisation:
Chiara Bortoli,
Fiorenzo Zancan,
Andrea Rosset
JENNIFER ROSA is a collective
of research in contemporary art
active in Vicenza (Italy) since 2005.
The body, the human figure, the
presence, the time of being are
the main themes of a research
that articultes itself through
performances, videos,
videoinstallations, photography.
| Twins and Mothers and Daughters are projects of serial video-photography, created with the collective Jennifer rosa. For these works we asked couples of mothers and daughters and of twins to pose before a never-changing backdrop for a time of 16 minutes, looking into the lens without doing anything. We don’t require an absolute immobility, but the absence of any gesture or intent of communication. During each posing session 1,000 photographs are taken, then they are edited into a short film of 1 minute 40 seconds, which, as opposed to a photography shot, also includes the time dimension. Thanks to the reduction of the real which can be achieved through this device, the portrayed subjects trace a sort of dance on the spot, made of breaths, fluttering of eyelashes, micro-movements of the face, of the head, tiny readjustments of their posture. They unconsciously dance their being there. The shooting device is automatic and during the posing session the people are left alone in the room. The given tasks create an unnatural, challenging situation. Apart from the possible embarrassment of posing for a portrait and of being watched for a long time by the Other evoked by the device, apart from the concern about offering an “acceptable” image of oneselves, on top of it there comes the fact that it is not just about being photographed, but about being led to live a veritable experience, which somehow summarises the relationship between the two persons. With Mothers and Daughters (2010) for the first time we focused our attention on the family portrait, choosing our subjects on the basis of the relation binding them. Whereas in Mothers and daughters the two women were bound by a vertical relationship, a generational one, with Twins (2012, still in progress) we were interested in the exploration of the horizontal relationship characterising brothers and sisters. In order to stress the identity issue – which was however already present in Mothers and daughters -, we thought it interesting to zoom our field of observation onto couples of twins, even if not necessarily identical twins. We left complete freedom to each couple to choose the clothes they would wear while posing, to decide whether to highlight their similarities or differences, and therefore whether to draw the viewer’s attention onto the individual or onto the “unique” individual unit originated by the sum of two individuals. So was also for the choice of their spatial relationship with one another and within the framing. From the variety of the details, the viewer is invited to seize similarities and differences, first of all in their somatic features, but also in their attitudes, in their postures, in their emotional response to the experience they are having, and in the tension which is being created between both persons. |