Them

Them is a video installation where common African names written with coffee are swept away by water and drown inexorably. The year 2018, in addition to being the one in which my family adopted a mother and a child who fled the war and arrived with the “boats of death” (whose names are among those in the video), was a tragic year for immigrants. Almost 2300 died. An average of 6 people a day, the same number of the people in the video. The written names are of both men and women and were chosen without any criteria, apart from those of the mother and child already mentioned. This is because when we hear news of dead immigrants we are used to hearing only the number of deaths and not their names, their history, their identity. The image that is created is that of many small units that seem to move, migrate. The coffee, in its shades, represents the color of their skin and the sense of bitterness that all this death brings with it