family resemblance by Alice Bolognani
Family resemblance – Istanbul 2009
Family Resemblance Serie Istanbul 2009 – UV light samples
Family resemblance serie (Istanbul 2009)
Alice Bolognani – Family Resemblance Series (Istanbul, 2009)
The Family resemblance drawings have been made in Istanbul, within the context of the Platform Garanti Art Center Residency Program. This work takes inspirations from the Francesco Mattuzzi work Startrucks, an artistic project started in 2006 with the aim to explore the reality of the truck-drivers as a social group characterized by its own practices and shared languages, among which the decoration of the truck – being the most visible element – takes
on a particular importance. Behind the decoration, however, deeper elements are hidden which could be grasped through analysis –
sometimes macroscopic and sometimes microscopic – of the elements it is made up by. The result is a personal open diary, which expresses both individuality and the affiliation to a social group. Mattuzzi works as an antropologist that tries to question and represent, from an outsider point of view, the “otherness”.
The Family resemblance work also aims to represent the Turkish truckers sub-culture by means of graphical images. The main concept underlying the work comes from the field of language philosophy and cognitive science: prototype theory, connection/ distance instances and categorization process. In particular, “family resemblance” is a concept created by the philosopher Wittgenstein (1953) to empirically describe the way in which people compare similar experiences in order to create a category. He points out that things that may be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities “[…] we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. […]”.
By applying anthropological qualitative research techniques, like participant observation, in the many contexts of Turkish truck drivers interaction, I had the feeling of family resemblance as described by Wittgenstein and this feeling inspired my art work. When I observed this sub-culture from an outsider point of view, I simultaneously perceived the differences between every single person or artifact beside many overlapping similarities within the fields of like paraverbal language, shared codes for action and interaction which weren’t fixed, but always changing…not completely describable with language category and not completely reproduced by perception. The result is a series of drawings in which the subjects are suspended between reality description and family resemblance perceived by an outsider point of view, with all the limits of language and perception that only an outsider can have.