J LIFE
Arising from an encounter with a young foreign woman in Italy, J LIFE is an ongoing, multilayered project that is being developed through photography, video and prose.
Arising from an encounter with a young foreign woman in Italy, J LIFE is an ongoing, multilayered project that is being developed through photography, video and prose.
From the story of a political refugee, a victim of trafficking – from which the short film LIFELIE (2020) is derived – the artist unlocks a thought-provoking reflection on identity and freedom, the body and censorship and closeness and violence between people and cultures.
J, a young woman from Lagos, talks about her life in Nigeria, Libya and Italy. Very close to her is another woman, their breaths, bodies almost touching in the room where one photographs, the other is photographed. A nearby voice, a fragmented body, an isolated gaze.
Snatched cellphone photos where the artist was asked not to take pictures of the mother and daughter, cropped to protect them, or stolen snapshots of scraps of the everyday private life of a family that is restricted in how and when they can meet. The indecency of each photograph that claims as its own something that belongs to others, the violence of laws that sever the integrity of natural relationships, the limitations of images that are forced to be speechless in their telling.
J’s handwritten words on her sorrows and joys triggered by the portraits taken by Paola Risoli, jotted down in notebooks and on pieces of paper. The artist’s words about what is behind the blacks of the short film LIFELIE, inscribed on repeated images of J’s face. The excerpts from the documents of the Juvenile Court, the Ministry of the Interior dossier, and the reports of the Franz Fanon Center in Turin. Texts cut out, overlapping letters, no longer decipherable, custody, a trail, the protection of sensitive aspects of a story that also raises questions about whether or not to reveal it.
J LIFE
Italia 2019
11’13’’
digital video FHD
color
audio stereo
pidgin (inglese nigerian english)
italian subtitles
shooting editing sound: Paola Risoli
screenplay and subject: Paola Risoli
production: self-produced movie
XIII TSN International Short Film Festival
Roma, 18 – 21 June 2020
BEST DIRECTOR
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
BEST EDITING
Documentary Section
Artistic Director: Mimmo Calopresti,
Jury President: Flavia Perina
