"My mother brought me into the world along with thousands of other children. She was a midwife.”. With a raw and visually poetic language all his own, Mario Banushi offers a fragile yet ferocious ode to the women who raised him. 

At barely a year old, Banushi was placed in the care of his grandmother in Albania until his thirteenth birthday. When he reunited with his birth mother in Athens, he moved into the apartment above the bakery where she worked. There, the scent of warm bread mixed with the voices of women—young and old—who shaped his everyday life. A life cradled by different generations with flour-dusted hands. The Albanian words “mami” (mother) and “mam” (bread) come together: One pulls out one’s heart and offers it to another like a warm loaf of bread. 

Drawing inspiration from life, the widely praised Albanian wunderkind Mario Banushi creates a visual feast: an unholy and dreamlike monument to the mother-child relationship. To celebrate it. To exorcise it. To fill it with vows and curses. To fall in love with it.  

MAMI is a hymn to all the women who raise us.