Art
Jo, Josephine, Giuseppina and Tracy
The film Jo, Josephine, Giuseppina and Tracy (07:00) is a memorial to Giuseppina Salvatore (1933-2015) that explores Tracy’s relationship with her mother.
The film Jo, Josephine, Giuseppina and Tracy (07:00) by Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen is a memorial to Giuseppina Salvatore (1933-2015) that explores Tracy’s relationship with her mother.
Visual flashes reveal connections in a five-decade long relationship between mother and daughter. Conditions of duality – Scots-Italian identity – are offered as glimpses, through considerations of place, belonging and language. The path, or sentiero, in the video lies beween Tracy’s grandparents’ villages of Collemacchia and Cerreto in the region of Molise, Italy.
Repeatedly treading the same short ancestral route, walking as empathic movement and transformative experience enables and embodies a state of ‘becoming’ that is explored and revealed through moving image, still-image photography, drawing and audio recording.
Walking as part of an artistic practice ensures immersion in the outdoors while exploring ideas and imagining alternative worlds. Walking this route, Tracy’s relationship with her mother repeatedly emerged, as did her mother’s dis-engagement with the physical site of her roots. Undertaking the walk, a psycho-geographical memory was re-enacted; Tracy’s memory an echo of her mother’s and her grandparents’ memories. The track provided a space of isolation and confinement.
The act of walking continues to shape Tracy today; as she leans into slowness she is formed in the present, holding to it in movement, settling into a restful liminal place. Walking, for her means to commit to a deep engagement with her body. While everything continues to move, perceived pauses heighten her awareness of the matter around her. She simply feels and thinks things more.
Scottish première, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival; UK première, Walking Women, Somerset House, London; Public Talk, Walking Women, Forest Fringe, Edinburgh Festival; 2016
