DOMESTICATION

Video 2K, 15’

Courtesy the artist, Studio Stefania Miscetti, Galleria Marcolini, Richard Saltoun Gallery and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence

SILVIA GIAMBRONE

The work of Silvia Giambrone (b. 1981 in Agrigento, Italy) is explicitly political in nature, illustrating and denouncing the ways in which women are subjugated through cultural models regarding the body, through norms of behavior, and through the manipulation of our imaginations. Her work is a compelling device for reflecting on the domestication of violence and on the taboos surrounding this impulse; it examines how subjugation can employ a socially accepted language of love and affection, a language to which we are so accustomed that we can no longer recognize it as a form of oppression.

In her video Domestication, Silvia Giambrone 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 the idea that “education is nothing other than learning to obey.”. This obedience is obtained through both physical and psychological coercion, in an approach to child-rearing that scholars now call “poisonous pedagogy.” This hurtful set of rules, which formed the backbone of children’s education for centuries, has had a series of cultural and behavioral repercussions that educators and psychotherapists consider responsible for the violence that permeates human relations even today. 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. These everyday items, seen through the distorting lens of violence, are potentially dangerous and menacing: both witnesses and tools of a symbolic violence. The boundary between victim and abuser is so blurred that it becomes hard to say which is which; the whole video is pervaded by a tension that always seems on the point of erupting, having festered within the domestic space as well as in the psyche of the people who live there. The visual register is an alternation between obsessive, disturbing rhythms and moments that are almost dreamlike, despite the plausibility of the setting and characters.