I Made Them Run Away

I Made Them Run Away – “It was summer and, like many children, I was spending my days at a summer camp. One evening, I was very excited when I got home and after having dinner with my grandmother, I went upstairs, where my mother and I lived, with the intention of going to sleep. As I entered, I saw my mother and a man sitting on the sofa watching television. My mother asked me how my day had gone, and I couldn’t resist showing them both what I’d learned. I started dancing and singing in front of the TV for about 10 minutes, until the man interrupted my performance by saying “It’s late, I’d better go”, followed by my mother’s dark look at me. After saying goodbye to the man, my mother ran back into the house, shouting at me, “How is it possible that you make them all run away?”.”

“I Made Them Run Away” is a multi-layered story that weaves together archival family photographs and contemporary images with texts written by the artist’s mother. Shifting from one point of view to another, Zanin depicts the complicated, recurring triangular relationship between herself, her mother and “the man”, a multiple, non-constant figure, mostly invisible in the work.

Fantasizing about a man she could never have, the artist’s mother wrote her thoughts and desires to an imaginary man in a journal entitled “Letters to a Man I Never Had”. The poetic, nostalgic writing clashes with the torn images of the family, of which the mother has kept only her silhouette, ripping out all her old boyfriends and creating objects saturated with anger and loneliness. The artist captures objects, gestures, animals, body parts and idyllic visions, symbolic images reconstructing feelings and sensations that have emerged from the past.

The interplay of perspectives created by the interweaving of archival photographs, texts and contemporary images opens up a dialogue between mother and daughter at two different points in time, a reflection on the role of the past in the present, and an exploration of the coexistence and transition of opposing feelings within family ties and romantic relationships, such as compassion and anger, attraction and repulsion.