SITUATION #213

Italian artist Alba Zari’s ongoing work Occult reflects on the methods of indoctrination employed by the Christian fundamentalist sect into which she was born, The Children of God (now known as The Family International). The work draws on her family archive, propagandist comics, texts and videos, and archive images of other members of the sect taken from the internet. Founded by David Berg (alias Moses David) in California in 1968, the sect spread worldwide during the 1970s and fell into disrepute for encouraging sex with minors and prostituting women in the group as a means to recruit new members, a practice it cultivated under the name “Flirty Fishing”. This included separating the children so begotten – known as “Jesus Babies” – from their mothers. This is a fate that Zari and her family share: at the age of thirty-three, her biological grandmother and her mother, who was thirteen at the time, fell into the clutches of The Children of God. The fragments she compiles lead her on a photographic search for clues as she attempts to get a handle on the sect’s propaganda machine, while brutally confronting the viewer with the fate of one family – and thus, by extension, with the trauma of a host of other women and children. The feeling of community, ecstasy and belonging conveyed by the images in the public archive is a world away from the evident pain experienced at the individual level, the glorification of child abuse and forced prostitution and, lastly, the cult’s colonialist practices carried out under the guise of Christian missionary work.