Credits

Videomaking - Valentina Zanzi

Music - BU (!)

Actors - Anonymous Freelance Photographer and unidentified pendulars

Poem - Puccio Chiesa

 

Lacking works (original title "_ vuoti di lavoro") is an approximatively eleven minutes video work inspired by a real situation of unemployement in which two young photographers found themselves at the early beginning of their freelance career. The two artists, who used to live and work together based in the same small house in Milan, wake up in a morning having nothing planned during the daytime because of the difficult situation of the labor market they are approaching. Their common starting position is suddenly broken by the initiative of one of them, who starts recording her collegue in all the slow and repetitive actions of their ordinary day. The second one turns into the unaware protagonist of a video concept about his inaction. Thus, "inaction turns into an action describing an inaction".
Frame by frame the slow in-house set is opposed to a frantic outside set, which shows people walking or running from station to station in order to get to the workplace. Pendulars are running around while the precarious worker is motionless in his kitchen. But the two opposite situations hide something which is actually in common.
The meaning of the video is summerized at its beginning, where it's possible to read a poem by Italian poet Puccio Chiesa which could be translated as follows:
 
the daylight immediately chases us /
it takes us where we do not want to go /
it covers our eyes /
it takes our breath away //

the sun is always the first of all wonders /
we are tired, thus we obey /
then the evening comes, and feeds on us /
_lacking work

The background idea is that time passing between two consecutive productive actions is full of anxiety and expectations, and even if it gets satisfied or not people are forced to live in a social system which is regulated from higher economical decision-makers who unfairly affect the ordinary living conditions of the larger part of the population.
In the video everything seems to be opposite even if the research of an aesthetic language moves in both sets through the study of elements of daily experience: fruits and vegetables in the kitchen, coats and shoes in the stations.
The possible link between the two "sets" is given by a frame of a newspaper with a back cover advertising claiming "ask him" ("chiedilo a lui"). The meaning - at first sight - seems to be "ask the reason of what you're daily forced to do to the unemployed guy" but, at a second level of analysis, could be also ask to somebody who is "out of yourself", out of your condition. Even in the soundtrack, which is an electronic loop (composed by Italian musician BU (!)) adding elements repetition after repetition, the only spoken words say "ask it to him", in a sort of erroneous literal translation from the italian statement.

 

Length

12'07"