Martina Zanin (b.1994) is a visual artist born in San Daniele del Friuli. She received her MA in Contemporary Photography in 2018 from IED Madrid. Previously, in 2016, she graduated in Photography at ISFCI - Institute of Photography in Rome. In 2018 she attended a workshop about curatorial practice at MAXXI National Museum for Contemporary Arts and she is currently studying Plastic Arts. In 2018 she has been shortlisted for the Lucie Foundation Fine Art Scholarship and for the Fiebre Dummy Award with the work I Made Them Run Away. The latter has been exhibited in 2018 in Turin, at JEST. Zanin has participated to different group exhibitions and her works has been published on various magazine, both online and printed. On her work she mainly uses photography as a medium to deal with topics such as memories, relationships and coincidences, and how those affects our daily life. The events that marked our past and have an impact on our present. Using past to predict the future.
"One night I went home very excited and after having dinner with my grandmother I went upstairs - where my mother and I used to live - with the intention of going to sleep. As I entered I saw my mother and a man sitting on the couch watching television. Happy to meet someone new, I started dancing and singing in front of the TV for about 10 minutes, as long as the man finally interrupted my performance saying: "It’s late, I’d better go." Once greeted the man, my mother comes back in the house yelling at me: “How could you possibly make them all run away?"."
Even after having been through difficult relationships, Giulia - my mother - has never lost her desire to create the perfect family, nor her great fear for loneliness. She found herself living in years when the first websites for meetings had begun to take hold and she decided to find her soulmate through this way. This brought her to know, and to make me know, dozens of different men, some of whom have lived in our home.
At first sight these men appeared very gentle and caring, but shortly their behaviors changed and they turned out for what they really were; what they wanted was clear, of course the family was not part of their interests.
'I made them run away' is a multi-layered story weaving together archive material and photographs with texts by my mother. It brings together past and present to examine how these relationships have influenced the relationship with my mother and the current perception of men.
