A Letter can always Reach its Destination
- About
A Letter can always Reach its Destination, 2012
Part 7 of Scams (I must first apologise) project
Video installation
HD videos, 2 continuous synchronized, hologram screen, 122 min
Winner of the ACAP (Abraaj Capital Art Prize) 2011
The video title is a reference to Jacques Lacan’s seminary around Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, with comments by Slavoj Zizek. It investigates the claims that when receiving a letter, one instantly feels the intended recipient. Even if we aren’t, we become it, thus a letter always reaches its destination.
This installation echoes The Rumor of the World, featuring the same thirty-eight amateur actors, this time filmed entirely differently, in full length, interpreting these emails, embodying them, making them tangible, audible and visible. Standing up side by side, the characters rotate on a screen in the back of the room. Progressively, one steps out from the lot. A face emerges from the group and an individual tells a story, shifting from one reality to the other. Stepping out of the background, the character transparently appears on a second screen, in front of another like a hologram.
The superimposed screens generate a sort of ghost, an uncertain virtual presence.
A Letter can always Reach its Destination resonates with the artist’s artistic and cinematographic research on disappearance, presence, latency, and evocation; its starting point is an absence – a virtual communication through emails – and then through the actors’ presence and performance, attempts to impulse life into an abstract fantasy.
- Other Installations
