Music: Giacomo Salis
single-channel video
B/W – Color
16:9
stereo
14 min
Italy/ Spain
ἐκπύρωσις, ekpýrosis, “out of the fire”, in Greek philosophy is the universal conflagration or “great fire and end of the world”.
In order to remove the historical aspect of the images, I tried to rethink of them as electrical images. Soldiers move around the fire, some people move in a place immersed by light, like the body of a man moving through electrical spasms. The fire that destroys and the fire that generates new form through light, which is revealed and becomes an icon in the same way the image becomes coloured, when it manifests through the red colour of the flames, after the white and black of the documentation, of the historicization of the image. The question I started with is how the weight of the images can still be felt, as now, in a surplus of images, we can still see. In the end, the electroshock seems to be a cancellation of the contaminated look, an iconoclastic action.
Archive material
The Night of the Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), (1938). Euronews.
Electroshock Therapy, (1940). History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.