WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > WE ATE THE WIND

HEART OF HAWICK, ROOM 205
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 31′ (looped)

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

In We Ate the Wind, Emily Jacir – a Focus artist at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2021 – presents a rivetingly percussive engagement with issues of community, migration and labour. Encompassing archival footage, performance, documentary and play, this multi-channel work considers a specific episode in Swiss history within the broader cycles of capitalism and the international imperatives of workers’ rights. 

The historical episode in question is Switzerland’s large-scale postwar recruitment of foreign labour. Nearly nine million immigrants – including two million Italians – were simultaneously issued permits and denied permanent residence, their terms limited to nine months and their families’ entry strictly forbidden. When workers brought their children, they did so illegally – the youth essentially living in secrecy. 

Jacir confronts this immense diasporic trauma through montage and physical metaphor, mapping otherwise disparate contexts across a canvas that is intuitive and imaginative in the music-like counterpoints it evokes. In the archive footage, we observe men work, play and protest. One sequence, from 20 November 1970, shows 2000 seasonal workers demonstrating outside the Federal Palace in Bern. Games of Morra – the ancient game in which two people thrust their hands at one another, each extending a number of fingers at the same moment they guess how many digits they and their opponent have displayed in total – unfold with an infectious, gripping energy. 

The artist complements these monochrome sequences with her own present-day observations: train stations; scaffolded architecture; the jagged cliffs of Pietrapertosa; communal celebrations in Bethlehem’s Manger Square; pizzica folk dances in small-town Southern Italy; an intergenerational group echoing the fiercely contested pastimes of the earlier archive footage. 

Jacir’s work is serious but never mournful in its anger, and the collective energy of her scenes is powerful and persuasive. The artistic collaborations that anchor We Ate the Wind feel liberating. Chief among the artist’s collaborators here is Andrea De Siena, who choreographs a group of dancers to re-enact the synchronised rhythms, the involuntary routines, of the men from the older footage. In a visually minimal but acoustically rich room, the group stamps its feet in visceral unison, as if to embody the syncopated pounding of rolling stock – not as dirge, but as liberation.