Emmaline Zanelli

Born and raised in Adelaide, Emmaline Zanelli (b. 1994) is a South Australian artist whose expanded photographic practice captures a range of performative, collaborative and sculptural techniques. In her final year of study at the Adelaide College of the Arts in 2015, Zanelli majored in photography, approaching it as a kind of catch-all medium; “you can make whatever you like, take a picture of it and then it is photography.”[1] A wide view of Zanelli’s practice reflects this philosophy; her chosen photographic subjects are diverse, from prehistoric life to popular culture. However, Zanelli’s strong DIY aesthetic, sense of humour and material playfulness, her interest in working and making with others, and her explorations of the powerful relationship between photography and memory remain constant. “I’m massively nostalgic. I don’t photograph things in a nostalgic kind of way but I do get a lot of solace in constructing a world and documenting it, like keeping it in a little vault.[2]

In 2020, Zanelli was commissioned by ACE Open to create a company Christmas card. Self Portrait as The North Star at the 2002 Credit Union Christmas Pageant heading to the David Jones Magic Cave (2020) restages Zanelli’s childhood experience of Adelaide’s iconic annual Christmas Pageant and Magic Cave, featuring larger-than-life dioramas, fair rides and a fantastical replica of the North Pole – the highpoint of which is Santa’s photo booth. “When you’re small you remember things being massive or terrifying. I think that’s kind of funny but it’s also really beautiful and powerful and mysterious.”[3] Crafting a pageantry of her own, Zanelli’s makeshift costume transforms her into a butter yellow eight-pointed star – some limbs outstretched, others comically soft – whilst backgrounded by a curtain of failed Santa photo booth portraits trawled from the internet. “I like the idea of remixing memory. Every time you remember something it becomes more distorted by who you are now.”[4]

Zanelli’s solo exhibition RIFE MACHINE, first exhibited at ACE Across in 2017, explored a similarly performative and ritualistic approach to portraiture. For the first time, Zanelli worked with subjects around her – friends, family, a former teacher. Making use of the ubiquitous 6 x 4 photographic print, she created immersive environments and makeshift costumes for her sitters: a boyfriend dons a feathered suit of close ups of the artists belly button; a whole room is plastered in images of shimmering water, leaving only hands, a face and bathroom taps as context clues.

Even Zanelli herself is both subject and object. In the self-portrait Red Room (Safe House) (2017), Zanelli’s impulse to simultaneously obscure and reveal is evident as her costume and setting are entirely formed from stills of own laparoscopy. RIFE MACHINE makes use of the materiality of images and draws on the power of the image as a transformative device, “There are expectations around how you treat a photograph. Ripping up a picture, for example, is a powerful act.[5]

[1] Emmaline Zanelli, unpublished interview with Belinda Howden, Adelaide, 1 November, 2021.

[2] -[5] Ibid.

The three-channel video installation Dynamic Drills (2020), produced for ACE Open’s 2020 South Australian Artist Survey If the future is to be worth anything, marked Zanelli’s first foray into moving image. Again working with family, Zanelli’s subject was her paternal grandmother, Mila, who worked a lifetime in manufacturing. As a young woman in Italy, Mila was a knitting machine technician. Upon emigrating to Adelaide she worked in a wool processing plant, shrink-wrapped chickens and made car seat covers for Holden, among other forms of manual labour. Dynamic Drills explores Mila’s work history and the relationship to Zanelli’s own labour as an artist, “I wanted to explore the idea of familial legacy and the transference of memory. Dynamic Drills proposes that memory is a group exercise and, furthermore, it is work.”[6]

Across the half hour montage, Zanelli and her Nonna play out ritualistic scenes of work: Mila’s muscle memory kicks in as she mimes threading a knitting machine; an over-engineered Rube Goldberg-esque conveyor belt sorts and processes apricots; Zanelli rides a stationary exercise bike to light a scene of her grandparents making a Skype call. The video also features a voiceover. In her native tongue, Mila recites passages from Manifesto del Futurismo (the Manifesto of Futurism) – an early twentieth century document by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. An art historical movement, Futurism rejected previous centuries of Italy’s agrarian society and classical heritage, instead championing the proposed freedoms of speed, machinery, industry and war.

[6] Emmaline Zanelli, unpublished interview and artist website, accessed 13 October, 2021

Written by Dr. Belinda Howden with contributions from Louise Dunn.

Pocket Money

Emmaline Zanelli’s video work examines the ‘first job’ as a rite of passage in a capitalist economy. Often recorded in their bedrooms, the subjects interviewed about their job life – mostly in their teens and early twenties – show the artist the items they have purchased with their first pay cheques. This moving portrait might offer something reasonably interpreted as a probing revelation of the aspirations of a rising generation, as represented by their carefully curated intimate spaces.

By focusing on one of the rituals that defines this transitional period of life, Zanelli acknowledges childhood and adulthood as unstable containers, which occasionally spill into one another. In most contexts, young people’s interactions with others are defined by their status as minors. While they remain in the family home, attend school and sleep in their childhood beds, in the workplace they are ostensibly treated in the same manner as their adult counterparts. Dressed in uniform, they absorb the unpredictable weather of adult life: the impatience of overburdened managers; the unspent tensions of family outings, and their accumulated irritations causally redirected toward service workers.

Text written by Tara Heffernan is an art historian and critic, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength Catalogue, pg. 191 -198