«Non riuscivo a vedermi da nessuna parte». Amandine Gay e le immagini di casa in bilico tra due mondi

By structuring her perspective around different levels of subalternity (woman-black-rootless), in the film Une histoire à soi (2020), Afro-feminist filmmaker and artist Amandine Gay traces the history of five adoptees through their private images. The family photographs and films show experiences of transnational and transracial adoptions within domestic contexts in which the newcomer is welcomed as an individual body to be annexed to the lineage, according to a principle of resemblance that is dictated by social conventions, often conveyed by the same amateur visual practices. Traditionally, in fact, the home is configured both as the space for the exhibition of family images and as the setting for the representation of the family group in moments of happiness and self-celebration. However, in the case of adoptive families, such representations show an excess that emphasises the discontinuity and difference between the children and the rest of the group, recalling an elsewhere that is defined through the reinterpretation of the principle of analogy, on which a new identity is founded under the sign of the extended relationship.