The Many Mes of Me

Many Mes of Me (2020) is a video installation where the passive observation of a person who "goes one’s own way", and its psychological effects are studied. The study takes the shape of a performative family portrait.  The artists' son Cesar, 21, is responsible for the performative execution of this work. He is elusive by nature and has recently chosen to go his own way by moving to Croatia, where he started moonlighting as a tiler.

In the video, Cesar stands in an indistinct environment where the basic elements of life - earth, sky, water - set the background for a repeated personality split. He gradually becomes an ever-smaller fragment of himself. Much like the root of a number is the number multiplied by itself a few times, and by doing so becomes the original number.

Many Mes of Me marks the endpoint of a series of works spanning more than 15 years where the artists have documented their children growing up. From early childhood in the multichannel video installation Kids on the slide (2005-06), through the brief moment of weightlessness, naivety, carelessness and hope in adolescence in Offspring Taking Off (2010) to young adulthood. The connecting thread of all of these works is the dialectics of familiarity and individuality, an homage to a set of Rousseauian beliefs in non-possessive parenting – imprinted on the artists themselves due to their upbringing in the 70s.