2019
2-channel video
HD, color, sound
28 minutes
Dimensions variable

Ricerche is a 5 part video series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore, to stage a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the United States. While the political climate in post-war Italy in 1963 was deeply distinct from that of the United States in this contemporary moment, both are sites of a persistent political condition in which so-called value-based policy and ideology act out symptomatically to cover up underlying economic and political vulnerabilities.

Ricerche: one addresses the original question Pasolini poses to kids on the streets of Rome and Palermo: How are babies born?

In 2015, I went to Provincetown, MA during Family Week, an annual gathering for LGBTQ+ families. My initial intention was to interview groups of 5-8 year olds. While doing those interviews, I kept running into various awesome and radical youth organizers working with a group called COLAGE to run workshops and other activities for younger kids. I invited a group of them, ranging in age from 17 to early 30s, to do an interview. As kids born in the 80s and 90s, these young people offer a perspective informed by their experience of being in LGBTQ+ families facing a very different landscape of discrimination and acceptance than that of the 5-8 year olds.

Starting with Pasolini’s question: how are babies born? the conversations move successfully and unsuccessfully as the youngest children push productively against the interview format. Here the children speak to and also demonstrate the incredibly expansive frameworks and insights of non-normative family compositions. Both groups of young people speak through and alongside the particular challenges facing queer family formations: the persistent and pervasive pressure of heteronormativity, the demands for narrative accounting, the complex issues of race and class that arise within queer participation in reproductive technologies and the rapid shift over the past 12 years in the US with respect to toleration for queerness, in general, and queer families, in particular.

Interviewees:
five to eight-year-olds
Meryl Scholfield, Finley Scholfield, Tristan Sylvestre-Margolis, Shane Pierson, Eylon Craghead-Goldman, Jillian Nichols, Winter Collins, Orion Akash Phelps, Dylan Sumner, Benjamin Braden-Forge, Ella Herwick-Poutre, Noemi Herwick-Poutre, Elise Inkster, Layne Joheim, Christian Wells Baylis-Gaba, Grayson McFerrin Hogan, Grayson McSweeney, Taylor Andrepont-Aycock, Tatum Andrepont-Aycock, Abby Boscher-Walsh, Ethan Boscher-Walsh, Guiliana M. Palmieri, Natalia Reichbach-Soto, Sophie Pennock Collins, Rosie Carioti-Darling, Eilzabeth Davis
young adults/adults
Brooke Albers, Jordan Polcyn-Evans, Angel Martin, Kerry Cullen, Jamie Lee Bergeron-Beamon, Robin Marquis, Ryan Kenji Keone Kuramitsu, Elijah Martin, Emmet Dupont, Malina Simard-Halm, Devan Wells, Jacob Polcyn-Evans, Dominik Doemer, Courtney Faria, Ash Lumpkin

Production Credits:
Director of Photographer/Cameraperson: Martina Radwan
Production Manager: Lala Drew
Sound Recorder: EE Miller
Sound Mix: Josh Allen