Premiere "La città dentro" and "Black, I Mean Normal"

On November 20t, 2020, as a major input to the A-Place project, LOOP Barcelona announced the premiere of the video production that won the first year edition of the open call. The winning proposal was that of ZimmerFrei, an artist collective based in Bologna and comprised of Anna de Manincor and Massimo Carozzi, its founding members.

“La città dentro” is 30-minute video that presents the experiences of a visually impaired Eritrean young man waiting for recognition of his newly obtained Italian citizenship, and a young girl, a friend of the protagonist, who is suddenly passing the days locked at home because of the pandemic. The film depicts a very peculiar construction of place, one which entails also an ensuing construction of a subjectivity and of a political identity that is at odds with what is considered “normal”. Both protagonists are confronting how new realities are impacting their friendship and how they must adapt to them.

In addition to this video, and on that same premiere, ZimmerFrei premiered “Black, I Mean Normal” which complements “La città dentro”. It is a six-minute audio in Italian with subtitles in English on a black screen. In it, we hear a passionate conversation between two visually impaired people talking about the personal ways in which they relate to the world and how they debunk certain subjective constructs, especially those concerning race and skin colour, something that obviously they are barred to perceive.

The public premiere was held online because of the restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic.