Costa Vece

The centerpiece of Costa Vece’s second solo show at Peter Kilchmann is a shabby red hut about ten meters long, made entirely from cast-off materials. The interior is partitioned into three cozy spaces with cardboard banquettes for sitting on. On a monitor in each cubicle, a video strings together archival images to tell the story of Vece’s mother and father, both Gastarbeiters (guest workers) of Greek and Italian birth, respectively, who traveled around Switzerland for years, vainly seeking their fortunes. When the couple divorced in the ’70s, the young Vece was sent to live in a sort of boardinghouse for indigent children. Twenty-five years later, the fractured family is reunited onscreen, their story told in a series of images—an empty, sunlit street, an man in an undershirt wolfing down a plate of spaghetti—that repeat themselves like a scratchy record. At once the tale of a family and of a disenfranchised class, the film is inescapably melancholy. Autobiography has always informed Vece’s work, but here the psychological foundations of his trademark tents and sheds—strangely welcoming and yet utterly precarious in their jerry-rigged construction—are especially plain to see.