The photograph documents a site-specific work embodying a reflection accomplished during a residence in Romania as part of the Intersecţia Residency Project by the artist Emanuela Ascari. The site of the residency is the house that belonged to her grandparents situated in a small rural village in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania.
The genesis of the work is linked to a private event, but at the same time paradigm of the recent history of Romania - hence placing it in the context of the great European twentieth century ideologies; that of Alexandru Zbarcea, Emanuela's grandfather, who in 1942 began to realize his dream of building a house. At the arrival of Communism in 1947 he, along with other landowners, was expropriated from his lands and forced to interrupt the construction of the house, that was never completely finished.
My residence started with a day at the National Village Museum "Dimitrie Gusti" in Bucharest, an open air museum of dismantled rural houses rebuilt in the museum, founded in 1936 to strengthen national sentiment of the new Romania unified after the First World War. A thought-provoking visit considering the attempt of awakening a sense of belonging to the new nation through the idea of dwelling and the notion of the rural house, which made me reflect on the concept of ‘house’:
is ‘the house’ ultimately representing the physical bond between man and Earth - of whatever architectural structure it might be, being the necessary condition and an essential requisite for his survival. I found the reflection aligning with the thought of the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas:

“The privileged role of the home does not lie in its being the ultimate goal of human activity, but in its being the precondition and – in this sense – the very start of it.
The gathering process necessary for nature to be grasped, for it to take on the form of a world, occurs from within the home. Man stands before the world as if he had come upon it, setting out from a place of his belonging:
from a home of his own which he may retire to at any time.”

The work reproduces the original planimetry of the house from 1942 excavated in scale 1:10 in the field in front of the house which was partly built finally between 1946 and 1947, and materializes the union between the idea of house, the physical materiality of the soil and the history of man:
Excavation: approximately 260 x 280 cm, depth 7 cm, of which remains only the photographic image.

Francesco Fabbri Prize, Section of contemporary photography, finalists.
Villa Brandolini, Pieve di Soligo (TV) IT
Curated by Carlo Sala.