More Notes on Manifesta7 - favourite works

One of the best works shown in the exhibition was Omer Fast's piece Looking pretty for God. His video is a sort of documentary about small funeral houses held by families from several generations in the US as a business which is fast disappearing.
The definition of boundaries in Fast's work is definetly useless: his video are not exactly documentaries but not exactly fictional either.
The borders in his works finish to melt and blur as it's really hard to give a definition of them.
Different points of view and voices join and confuse themselves in this work, which talks about death without showing it, and instead chooses images of childhood, make-up and emptiness.
This creates a much stronger effect even though it's not showing anything about death, working on a sense of anxiety which is very subtle and slight.
There's a cultural gap in the way we see death, and this underlined so many aspects we do not consider in our society about dead bodies.
The video reflects on the difficult passage from the painful private dimension of death to the public one, which has to look more pretty and -possibly- healthy.
It's really moving, in some points, to see how normal this job is for people who do it, and how hard it is for the one who have to relate to them.
The choice of using children with lipsync from the interviews is incredibly delicate and lyrical.