A four-part installation

colorless synthetic resin and crushed Alcacyl tablets on
found window framework with window glass (100x75x5cm), black blackboard paint on wall, white chalk on blackboard paint

Photo: Marco Blessano;
© Vittorio Santoro

A few years ago I found in a drawer at my parents’ house in Sicily a cotton bag with a faded English inscription. My father recalled: It was one of those flour sacks, which had ben given to his parents by the Americans as part of the Marshall Plan, the economic reconstruction program, after the Second World War.

In the 1960s, my father left the Sicilian village Buccheri, where he grew up. He emigrated as a young man by train to Switzerland. He found a job as a migrant worker, first in agriculture and then mostly in factories. My mother, whom he married before his departure, followed him two years later.

This installation “Une certaine idée de l’histoire de mon père” begins with the biography of my father as a distant starting point: a single person on the horizon of global events, social isolation, social integration, migration and the internal exile…

Vittorio Santoro,
Zurich, May 2013