This video, now in MAXXI Museum Art Collection, tells an untold, imaginary story set at the beginning of the twentieth century. Three children pose for a family photograph. They are young pioneers in a colony of Christian immigrants in Jerusalem. The photographer’s intervention has covered their bewildered faces with the false colors typical of the period, chromatic tones carrying the atmosphere of biscuits and warm milk, porcelain dolls, long sea voyages, dusty books, and a carefully staged innocence.
 

This image becomes the point of departure for a digital transformation in which the lower part of my face replaces theirs, producing a reversal of time and meaning that crystallizes into a suspended zone of non-time and non-meaning. From this fracture, another story begins to emerge, one that overlays the historical circumstances of the photograph while searching for a broader, metaphorical resonance. The three children become human archetypes, trapped in the eternal pillory of the family portrait.

What follows is a forced communion, gradually turning into mutual impatience and verbal aggression. Words pile up over one another until all possibility of communication collapses. This sense of incommunicability is built through a mash-up of fragments gathered from the internet, assembled into a contemporary dialogue of nonsense that reveals a simple and brutal truth: a word that is not listened to becomes, consciously or unconsciously, a form of violence.
 

In this way, the universe contained within the photograph, the epic of human dreams and illusions, the search for a lost innocence preserved in a family archive, is translated into the violence that has so often shaped history. When only one voice remains, one’s own mouth becomes a weapon. And yet, in the end, the work still recovers an invitation to listen, a fragile possibility of hope entrusted to these three unwitting ancestors.
 

Shows

Public Art Screens Festival, Norway - 2012

Simultan Festival, Romania - 2012

CYLAND Cyberfest, Russia - 2012

FILE Festival, Sao Paulo - 2013

Bob Wilson’s Watermill Center, New York - 2014

Doppio Schermo, curated by Bruno Di Marino @ MAXXI Contemporary Art Museum, Rome - 2017

RED Francesca Fini personal exhibition, Rome - 2018

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Credits
Concept, art direction, animation, editing - Francesca Fini

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Media
Doppio Schermo @ MAXXI Museum, brochure - open link