A Perfect Crime - Francesca Banchelli and Emiliano Zelada

About

A PERFECT CRIME is an event whose combination of elements can never be discovered, and whose precise details are open to infinite speculation. For their exhibition at Copenhagen Place, Francesca Banchelli (1981) and Emiliano Zelada (1979) take the notion of the perfect crime as point of departure for understanding the crossing of their work. Beginning with an imagined moment of perpetration, they each set out their own versions of the facts of the case. In the process, they reveal the nature of relationship between abstract concepts — which are, in their purest form, as perfect and immutable as an unsolvable crime — and the material execution of those concepts. Scenes and possibilities are explored; tracks are covered; and what remains of the evidence is laid before the viewer. Banchelli appeals to the relationship between the conceptual and its material outcome through processing physicality of matter, highlighting the uncertain moment in which a given context becomes an object in time. With The First Imperial Earthquake", a projection/installation entirely filmed in Brasil, she presents her evidence as a set of unknown locations, which are in turn represented symbolically in the gallery through a series of pennants whose origins remain undetected. The video narrates the shifting divide between wild nature and the presence of man