The film Jo, Josephine, Giuseppina and Tracy is a memorial to Giuseppina Salvatore (1933-2015) and explores Tracy’s relationship with her mother.
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.
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 is an important element in Tracy & Edwin’s lives; immersion in the outdoors enables them to speak lucidly and freely to each other, to explore ideas and to imagine alternative worlds. Walking this route, their conversations often turned to Tracy’s relationship with her mother, and her mother’s dis-engagement with the physical site of her roots. Repeatedly undertaking the walk, a psycho-geographical memory was re-enacted; Tracy’s memory an echo of her grandparents’ memories. The track provided a space of isolation and confinement and as Tracy & Edwin walked in front of and behind each other on the green passageway, they transitioned.
The act of walking continues to shape them; as they lean into slowness they are formed in the present, holding to it in movement, settling into a restful liminal place. Walking, for them means to commit to a deep engagement with their bodies. While everything continues to move, perceived pauses heighten their awareness of the matter around them. They simply feel and think 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