MOTHER RHM
Videoart
2014
This video moves across different languages: creative documentary, video art, and performance art. Styles and narrative modes overlap and interpenetrate in a journey where time bends and folds, allowing me to encounter my mother in an ahistorical yet deeply meaningful dimension. Within this impossible meeting, I reach something essential: an understanding of my own life, profoundly shaped by that relationship. It is a recognition that could only be articulated through the language of video art.
As the jury of SEFF wrote: “In her video, the author undertakes an offensive adaptation of the mother motif. In a surprising mixture of analog and digital material she still finds original solutions, playing a fascinating game with masks, pictures, and rituals. Inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Psychomagic,’ Francesca Fini gets close to the mother myth, freeing herself from it in the act of creation. She follows the tradition of 20th-century video and performance, while also creating a very personal but never entirely private universe.”
The video was conceived specifically for my solo exhibition Mother-Rythm, held in June 2014 at Mondrian Suite Contemporary Art Gallery in Rome and curated by Lori Adragna. The exhibition revolved entirely around my relationship with the mother figure and included the video, several physical and digital installations, and the live performance The Lunchbox, performed together with my mother.
In The Lunchbox, my mother and I enact a ritual centered on nourishment and separation. She feeds me, while I hold and transform a red wool thread that both connects and divides us. Gradually, I weave it into a mesh using my hands and arms as knitting needles. The mesh becomes a mask, then an umbilical cord linking us at the head: a mental cord, which I finally cut at the end of the ritual.
Shows
Mother-Rythm - Francesca Fini personal exhibition, Mondrian Suite Contemporary Art Gallery, Roma - 2014
ALIENS – le forme alienanti del contemporaneo, Ferrara - 2014
Anthropologie numérique / 3ème édition, Paris - 2015
SEFF ‘15 European Competition, Poland - 2015 (1st prize winner)
Videoformes Festival, Clermont-Ferrand - 2015
VideoNotte video art program, Trieste - 2016
RED personal exhibition, Rome - 2018
Credits
Concept, art direction, animation, editing - Francesca Fini
Performing - Francesca Fini, Nancy Fini
Website of the project