Rossella Biscotti, The City (still), 2019
“The City” opens with a typical scene of an archeological dig: close-ups of numbered plates marking findspots on a sandy surface, people bent over excavations. The scraping and scratching of tools and voices resonate from offscreen. Before conversations about the found objects become comprehensible, the soundtrack of the work draws attention to the multi-accented English-speaking voices, allowing us to infer the constellation of an international (work) community. Conversations proceed from explanations of the sequences of uncovered building structures and the astonishing amount of resulting material on the assumption that the houses collapsed due to instability and offerings were left behind intentionally, toward theories about the social structures among the former inhabitants of the collapsed edifice: “The notion of house society originally is about a community that shares an investment in a property,” explains a female voice. “It’s not about biologically related people. If you think about it from the perspective of all the people who have an investment in the continuity and reproduction of the house, in this sense, that investment is the proof that you belong […] Your identity with that space is dependent on your investment, fundamentally, of labor. So for me that particular datum is […] entirely predictable if what we talk about is the notion of a house society at its very essence, which is collaborative work […]”