Zigni
(2015)

“Ruth Maclennan navigates a territory between fiction and documentary, using her own encounters and experiences of a place as a starting point to explore overlooked moments and fragments of stories that reveal unresolved conflicts”, says Tintype gallery.

The film “Zigni” gives an insight into an Eritrean restaurant on Essex Road in London. The restaurant was opened in 2005 by an Eritrean woman expelled from Ethiopia, who has created a microcosm in the middle of the big city. The filmmaker approaches a private celebration with her camera, first from the outside through the misted windows, then inside, gliding over the surfaces of objects, party clothes and through the happy throng of people. A young man wearing a mortar board is celebrating his graduation.

Ruth Maclennan has developed a fascinating cinematic aesthetic of empathy that is characterised by respectful distance. In her hands the private celebration becomes a celebration of the cinematic senses. She transfers the exuberant mood, the swaying and dancing movements, the beautiful materiality of the women's garments into magnificent, calm film sequences. The individuals are immersed in different shades of colour. The light sources of the nocturnal, busy Essex Road create a cool blue or red shimmer in the restaurant, which envelops the objects as well as the guests and the host.

The buffet is laid out on a table in front of the window onto the street. The camera lingers on the centrepiece of the dinner, a “Zigni”, while a bus stops outside to let people on and off. The film is a reflection on our coming and going, on life's fates and on communities that are constituted around national dishes.

“Zigni” by Ruth Maclennan was commissioned by Tintype, London, in 2015. Teresa Grimes, director of the gallery, started Tintype’s annual Essex Road moving image program in 2014, in which artists make short films in response to the busy mile-long road. The gallery’s large window becomes a public screen for six weeks.

The presentation by videocity.bs at the fairground in Basel, highlights some of the video’s key moments: the eBoard at first floor level of the Congress Center Basel is part of the window front. This enhances the sense of a voyeuristic insight into a private domain. There is also an Eritrean restaurant in the same quarter, which is still relatively rare in Swiss cities. Thus, the dish Zigni represents home for some people, or an exotic foreign destination for others. Thus, the video shows the effects of global migration.

Andrea Domesle, translated by Andrea Domesle