Others
participants. Research workshop on artistic practice and its social
projection
Sebastian
Friedman
Participant
- Research Workshop on artistic practice and its social projection -
Buenos Aires 2001
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Family and maid
The incorporation of the domestic worker in the classic
family portrait responds to a pseudo-parodic scenario of this intimate
ritual, where the borders are shifting and the characters sometimes get
mixed up.
The frontal pose, as a formal technique, cons-titutes them in the act
of posing. Before the objective they are at the same time that which they
think they are; that which they'd like to be; and that which I, the photographer,
think they are.
Modern times and urban culture transform the primitive function of the
domestic worker. She becomes mother, sister, daughter, grandmother, worker.
Roles which she must cross and where inevitably the movements of affection
circulate. It's the place where employer and employee need each other,
want each other, ignore each other, desire each other, fight each other.
When doing the same ritual but now photographing the cleaner with her
own family
and in her own house, I look to contrast,
on one side her historic family role and on
the other the role(s) she must fulfil with the employing family.
This project presents itself, moreover, as a
historic record of a custom of the national middle class, tending to disappear
under
the effects of social decomposition provoked by globalisation.
In this critical search for the sense in the arti-culation of the traditions
and customs, there
is an irreducible centre which is the absence of my own family and the
fact of having been raised by domestic workers.
Sebastián Friedman
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Sebastián Friedman Was born in Buenos Aires in 1973. Recently
chosen for the exhibition of the Chandon prize in the Museo Castagnino
de la Ciudad de Rosario. Received the Subsidy for Artistic Creation
from the Fundación Antorchas and the First Prize of the photography
competition of the Banco Ciudad de Buenos Aires. E-mail: sebastianfri@keko.com.ar |
Others
participants. Research workshop on artistic practice and its social projection