Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Bridget Ann Baker

The Remains of the Father

Vidéo expérimentale | hdv | couleur | 24:0 | Afrique du sud, Italie | 2012

The Remains of the Father: Fragments of a Trilogy (Transhumance) is an experimental film and installation. It considers marginally remembered Italian colonial history in Eritrea and Ethiopia between 1930 and 1941. An Eritrean researcher Lula Teclehaimanot discovers an archive of non-official ethnographic literature collected by a Bolognese couple Giovanni Ellero and Maria Pia Pezzoli who had worked for the ?Ministry of Italian Africa? in Eritrea and Ethiopia during that period. Lula has been tasked by the municipality of Asmara to translate from Amharic into Tigryna: A contribution to the birth of the colonial style, an unpublished manuscript written by Ellero promoting the rationale of a modernist Ethiopian architectural vernacular. While she works Lula listens to a radio interview conducted in Italian, Tigryna and Amharic about the contemporary relevance of proverbs in Eritrean and Ethiopian societies. Set within a single room of a derelict house in Bologna which had been built for retired fascist army officials, is also the imagined office of Ellero. Many of the documents laying about the office; Eritrean and Ethiopian proverbs, hand drawn maps, and family emblems and curiously amongst these are the traces of her own family history, collated by Ellero before she was born.

Bridget Baker is an artist from South Africa. She is based in London and Cape Town. Baker?s work is situated at the intersection of documentary and myth creation, forming a series of complex visual fragments realized through film making, installation and documented re-stagings. Baker`s practice and visual language, while based on in-depth research, is often speculative and nomadic, seldom offering a finite position on events or histories. Her work has been exhibited extensively but also at The Museum of African Art (NYC), MAMbo (Bologna, Italy) Centro des Artes Contemporanea (Burgos, Spain), Palazzo delle Papesse (Siena, Italy), Neue Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (Cape Town), Bow Arts Centre (London), Glasgow Film Festival (Scotland), Dak?art 2012 (Senegal), Wapping Project (London), South African National Gallery (Cape Town), the South Africa National Arts Festival (Grahamstown, South Africa), and the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany).