Domestication
by Silvia Giambrone, Italy 2020, 15'
SUBJECT, PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT: Silvia Giambrone   SHOOTING: Mirko Fracassa
PRODUCER: In Between Art Film   EXECTUVE PRODUCER: Paola Ugolini
EDITING: Cristiana Cerrini AMC   LANGUAGE: vo: sound

Schermo dell'Arte - Archivio Film  Presented at Lo schermo dell’arte 2020 
 
As part of the project 
Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence
First project by the Fondazione In Between Art Film, that includes 8 artists’ shorts on the subject of domestic violence, how it has increased due to the pandemic and the resulting social containment measures.

In her video the artist explores the conceptual model of the Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children written by Swiss theologian Johan Sulzer in 1748, which revolves around theidea that “education is nothing other than learning to obey”. This obedience is obtained through both physical and psychological coercion. Two characters, a man and a woman, who have absorbed this paradigm of violence into their own relationship, move in an evocative, poetic way through a domestic setting. They are always shown alone in that shared environment, as if each were a projection or memory in the other person’s mind, but the objects they use serve as tangible signs of their actual presence. The boundary between victim and abuser is so blurred that it becomes hard to say which is which. The visual register is an alternation between obsessive, disturbing rhythms and moments that are almost dreamlike, despite the plausibility of the setting and characters.

Silvia Giambrone (Agrigento 1981, lives and works between Rome and London). Recent solo exhibitions at Museo del Novecento Milano (2020); Richard Saltoun Gallery London (2019). In 2019 she won the VAF Foundation Award.

Selected filmography:
Atto unico per mosche, 2018; Lettera dalle 8.17, 2016; Nobody’s Room, 2015.

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