Silvia Kolbowski: After Hiroshima Mon Amour

The video After Hiroshima Mon Amour by Silvia Kolbowski currently on view at Mala galerija in Ljubljana and based on Resnais/Duras masterpiece is a work about our inability to fully understand and represent the past and present catastrophes.
Originally, it is a story of a French woman and Japanese men who meet in japan twelve years after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and begin a one-night affair . They are an allegorical couple , standing for two different actors in the war- France and Japan- evoking challenging questions about disobedience, ethics and desire in a time of military conflict.
According to Jalal Toufic the most beautiful cinematic love stories take place against the backdrop of destruction of the city and possibly of the world, such as La jetté for example. Every love of a man and a woman takes place in seclusion from the world: every love of a man and a woman has for horizon the destruction of the world since they can restart the human race (this is one of the ways love is linked to death).
Rather than a reconstruction, this video uses repetition as a strategy where the diference is what matters. The story is re-enacted by ten different actors of ambigious ethnic origin and race, and unstable gender relations. It is contrasted by the found material that usually depicts violence and brutality, often from the point of view of the power.
As the video comes after the original it situates it in a contemporary political frame. We can observe the devastated streets of New Orleans after the hurricane Katrina, where the US government did nothing to secure the poorest population from the outcomes of the catastrophe. The shots problematize the relationship between the filmmaker and the viewer. We suddeenly burst into an apartment in Iraq along with american soldiers and face a man and an old woman screaming as they are confronted with machine guns. Also, we see a street, presumably in a Middle-Eastern city, from a viewpoint of a speeding driver and are placed on the side of watching the suffering of others. An uncomfortable position.
The texts that appear as titles are in fact a collage of Duras's original script for Hiroshima Mon Amour- fragmented and reassembled by Kolbowski- and Duras's written synopsis of the film. The narration oscillates between the third-person voiceover of the synopsis and a fascinating dialogue between the shifters “I” and “you”, which appear in the fragments appropriated from the film's script.
The dialogue between a French woman and Japanese man in the book Hiroshima Mon Amour beginns tellingly with:
“You have seen nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
“I've seen all. All.”
In the video, the text doesn't fit the image, while sound, silence and colours appear as active actors that give meaning to the material.
The artist became known for her project an inadequate history of conceptual art for which she invited various individuals to tell her their memories of an exhibition, performance or event of conceptual art without doing further research. She would record the audio and display it in a separate room from a video showing their hands while speaking.

Projects(Franchise)

In the midst of a black market, a town in town, a buissness spot with unlimited traffic, where micro economy based on exchange of all kind of goods except artworks, is performed daily by immigrants from India, Pakistan, China and Guiné Bissau. Thieves? Merchants? Speculators?
In the centre of Lisbon a small narrow street, where the red letters on ringbells are exclusively in chinese. Some of the apartments, however difficult to say which, host illegal chinese restaurants that differ little from common homes in order to hide their activity. The owners/cooks don't speak neither portuguese nor english and the clients choose from untranslated menus.
Located on the frontier with moorish and red light district, the zone is also known for delicious indian sweets of many colours.
To link this all and to check how global Lisbon art scene is, I propose a project called 'Franchise', set in an apartment rented on purpose on the same small street and showcasing ten international and local artists, with some projects specially commissioned for this show.
Irwin group opens a passport office. Sisley Xhafa does an exclusive performance on the notion of 'clandestino'. Sancho Silva stages a new project contaminating public space. While Dj/ Rupture streams radioshow live. Mio Stoj shares a video shot in a club 'Robert Johnson'. Emily Jouvet pays a spicy hommage to photography from a Paris' rooftop. And Piglet&Butcherboy take on Tate Modern...
Note: an immigrant will be contracted to staff during the show.

Projects(Day for Night)

In a time of global crisis, over-heated art market, when artworks are increasingly transformed into speculative objects I'm prosposing an exhibition through which various discourses, artistic positions and strategies flow freely like people and capital in global and networked world.
Day for Night takes the title from the work by William Kentridge that resembles a star galaxy, a central piece of this exhibition, to which other artworks establish invisible relations. Infact, the whole structure of the exhibition revolves around small, unexpected constellations of artworks, falling stars, that occassionaly, and for limited period of time, enter in contact.
Kentridge's piece is, in accordance with the statement 'contemporary art objects are frequently not what they seem', actually made by filming ants crossing sugar linen, which makes the pulsating movement on the screen seem very organic. Afterwards, the shot was turned into negative, in a smart twist of what is known as 'nuit américaine', a trick used in '70s B-movies, that means basically shooting night scenes during the day so that they would look like night, resulting in fake night scapes. Instead of that we get a reflection on the process of filmmaking and the magic moment of film projection, leading us back to the beginnings of cinema.
The selection of artworks is based on Ellipse collection that is particularily vibrant in terms of still and moving image of the last thirty years. Both photography and video were not considered art forms in the beginning and had hard time trying to enter (even if contemporary) art history. Photography took over a century to legitimise its existence, while in the case of video this process is still going on and some of the works in this exhibition could intervene fundamentally in this regard.
Similarily, the artists were selected in non-hierarchical way, coming from very different backgrounds, generations and media. The little known artists find themselves in the same space with the undervalued artists and big names. Further, artists from the global South, living in the recently affirming art capitals like Luanda, Jo'burg or Istanbul mix successfully with those lucky(or not) to come from the self-proclaimed capitals of modernism.
The discourses fluctuating thru Day for Night range from queer theory, post-colonial studies, art history, post-feminism, economy(of art), film studies, late capitalism, religion and political philosophy in order to re-articulate contemporary art in our present condition of global unrest.
Artworks on their turn share an aesthetic quality, a beauty that can be political and is normally associated with the 'Other'. And this 'Other' can be nowadays anyone not in possession of right passport. That is, everyone not coming from the forementioned 'centers of modernism' (which undoubtedly still remain the centers of artworld's financial transactions), or global North in general, as well as artists living outside their homeland for any reason. Obviously, this reaffirmation of aesthetics in the works of Kentridge, Pierson, Julien, Orozco or Gonzalez-Torres has nothing to do with aesthetic concerns of modernism or a retroactive cry for ' art for art's sake'.
Most of the videoworks in this exhibition tend towards spatiality and non-linear narrative structure, that becomes kind of a paradigm when observed through a wider scope, it can be noticed in the pieces by Sala, Ahtila, Julien, Yonamine and to certain extent also Kentridge and Atay.
Some of the chosen artworks (art is the question of choosing, afterall) share the performative aspects or are carefully staged as is the case with Sherman, Lucas, Julien, Moffat or Serrano, Breuning and McGuinley to name a few.
Lots of them are playful and engage with the world in humorous way (Orozco, Baldessari, Simmons, Schütte, Breuning, McGuinley, Kelley).
Though what links most of them is desire, as a theme, but also a driving force behind everything we do and inherent to artistic practice.
During the exhibition some artists reappear, we encounter them in different rooms and constellations (Pierson, Orozco, McGuinley and Gonzalez-Torres).
Day for Night shares a room with Anri Sala's double screen projection Blindfold, exhibiting two different angles on the same scene shot in Tirana, showing that what we see depends on our perspective, it is therefore conditioned. The fact that video is local specific locates it light years away from the 'liquid', 'neutral' videoworks from the past decades.
The constellation that follows is charged with desire. There is an untitled photo of purple-toned flowers by Fischli&Weiss; a colourful metamorphosis by Cindy Sherman who is known to use herself as a protagonist for most of the photos she does, adding performative aspect to her practice; a black and white self-portait obviously influenced by her by smoking Sarah Lucas; sexually intense Indian Corn and Pommegranate by Tillmans; blown-up Stardust by Pierson where queer theory enters; A History of Sex explained by Serrano, one of most disquieting artists of our time; an incredibly contemporary work by Baumgarten from '68 called Pupile; and, finally, Islamorada, a paradisiac photo of a palm tree taken from the bottom up that might as well have to do with cuban illegal immigration to the States via deep blue sea.
Next room proposes two video projections that apparently have very little in common, except the strong presence of women protagonists. Wind is part of the Eina Lisa Ahtila's project Love is a Treasure and is essentially about women, their complexities and relationships, for which she spend some time with the patients of psychiatrical institution. Julien's Fântome Afrique in its turn is a triple screen projection dealing with phantoms of the past, colonial history, cinema and love, shot in the african capital of cinema Ouaga. Its protagonists are two 'phantoms', a man and woman, who despite the proximity of their trajectories will never meet, because spectres are invisible even to each other. It is a tale about impossibility of love, and that would actually connect both videoworks, besides their decidedly spatial orientation and non-linear narration.
What follows is not yet titled sculpture of burning drums by Violette Banks, a work yet to come, forming a 'community' with Heroine by Pierson that refers to popular culture, queer world and the killing drug, completed with a post-colonial flavoured painting of sculls, Hula girls, by Ashley Bickerton from Barbados.
Further, the viewer encounters works by Yonamine and Fikret Atay, first being part of Luanda's young artists launched internationally through controversial Check-list: Luanda Pop exhibition at last Venice Biennial, which affirmed Luanda as an art capital to be watched on.
A humour and exuberance enters the exhibition, generally more inclined towards night visions through this stargate: Lemonspeed by Orozco and a 'carroty' Game for two players by Baldessari, through Dieter and Klaus by Schütte coupled with c-print jigsaw puzzles in plastic bag- Loverboy and Fainted by cubanico Gonzalez-Torres, and to close the room Tracey Moffat's latino flavoured knife on the table together with Lady G, that is, a naked blond princess on the horse, by Olaf Breuning; frivolous Jessy by McGuinley in all her beauty; and Mike Kelley's toy-like object The Way is I Am.
The red colour links the pieces from the constellation to come, from horrific video Charlotte by Steve McQueen, to the filtered Shinjuku cemetery by Thomas Struth, or equally terrifying woman from I don't live here anymore by Rondinone, to the teasing Three Red Petit Fours by Laurie Simmons to finish and digest the nightmare.
Day for Night, is coming closer to an end now, its flickering stars turning into stardust, and the last room is again dedicated to still images. Bathtub full of ecstatic youth; Foam on the street without providing a clear idea where it comes from, but nevertheless soon to be dissolved, recalls Sloterdijk; Nudes on the Bed, another joyful session of twenty-somethings, quite common these days; Double
Falling Sunset- a climax making the transition from day to night easier; infinitely triste Last Light; and untitled Cold Blue Snow and Key West dispersal, in an interplay of two artists- Ryan McGuinley and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Curating, intended as 'statement in the space' would involve discussions with an architect, having 'nuit américaine' as departure node, and trying to avoid clichés of screening videoworks.
The project will be documented in a thin publication, relying on images of the exhibited artworks accompanied by detailed description of each work and a short intro by the curator.
The exhibition will be announced internationally via E-flux, in addition to usual adds in local press.
Day for Night is the first project in the series of three exhibitions appearing under the common title For the Love of God (present condition and contemporary art), that obviously appropriates the title of Hirst's diamond scull, an artwork known to be at the same time democratic and elitist. It will be followed by History of Violence that puts together Serrano's photo of a member of Ku-Klux clan with Wallstreet by Opie and mehrlicht by Abdelsemed, or for instance Ruff's Petra Grot with Soldiers by Dijkstra. The last being Eyes wide Shut, to close the cycle with yet another title taken from film history. The project is taking as its premise a concept by Slavoj Zizek known as parallax gap.

The Next Step conference

9-10 May Ljubljana

In Ljubljana has just finnished the inernational conference of museums of modern and contemporary art organized by Moderna Galerija. Its title refers to the state of affairs brought about by the rapid globalization and the growing doubts concerning the universality of the Western canon of art history.
The conference appears at the moment when virtually all principal museums in the region are closed for renovation or (re)construction.. Could this be the right moment for them to think about a new type of museum based on the production of knowledge on still-uncanonized histories?
The other questions proposed deal with the work of the museums under global economic crisis and the loooming financial restrictions, and the course of action to be adopted when new spaces are opening up whose art has not yet been integrated into existing canon.
The speakers from the institutions such as Reina Sofia, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern were involved in the first panel discussion Include or change? that showed that two courses of action seem possible at the moment: one leads to the Other being merely subsumed into the existing art history system, and the other presumes the recognition of a need for a different approach to historicizing which would lead to a global transformation of the workings of the art system and the conception of the museum collections. It seems that all of them opted for the first possibility.
What is happening to the principal museum institutions in the region of former Yugoslavia were trying to respond the speakers from the museums of contemporary art in Belgrade, Skopje, Sarajevo, Zagreb and Ljubljana's Moderna Galerija.
The next question focused on the museum's original significance as a place of study and knowledge production and dissemination in the times of a neo-liberal economy and the global economic crisis, to which Charles Esche, Nina Möntman and Sabine Breitwieser were able to respond best and finish with lively discussion the first day of the conference at around eight o'clock in the evening.
On sunday followed the debate around the legacy of the museums in the countries of formerly repressive political regimes and the future they face based on the examples of Brasil, Poland and Eastern Germany. Museums in countries that used to be relatively isolated seem especially interested in including their local art in international context. How can this international context, specific yet global at the same time, in regions such as South America or Eastern Europe be problematized?
The final word was given to the artists who were asked to show how artists can help make histories presented by the museums more comprehensive.
Irwin quoted from their project East Art Map, which is an attempt to re-construct the art history from Eastern Europe of the last fifty years. Silvia Kolbowski presented her project an inadequate history of conceptual art, Tadej Pogacar his P.A.RA.S.I.T.E Museum of Contemporary Art and Gediminas Urbonas a winning entry for Guggenheim in Vilnius, a space ship by Zaha Hadid.
Artist on the move, Apolonija Sustersic talked about her own practice related to the critical analyses of space, and the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning and architecture.

Seminário re.act feminism

Galeria Vzigalica, Liubliana,
20 de Março de 2009.

Este seminário insere-se no projecto mais vasto, re.act feminism, que visa apresentar ao público um arquivo de vídeo com mais de oitenta peças de performance, desde a década de 60 e 70 até aos nossos dias, principalmente filmadas na Europa de Leste. Entre os trabalhos documentados dos pioneiros da performance, como Faith Wilding, Abramovic ou Valie Export, assinale-se uma forte e bem marcada presença de artistas da Europa de Leste, como Sanja Ivekovic, Natália LL e Ewa Partum, assim como alguns exemplos da produção mais recente de Boryana Rossa, Tanja Ostojic e Alketa Xhafa Mripa, assim como de Lilibeth Cuenca.
Bettina Knaup, uma das comissárias da exposição, considera que a história da performance, enquanto arte-em-processo, foi muito influenciada por mulheres desde o seu início, na década de 60, tendo ainda, claramente, precursores e raízes em outros movimentos do século XX. A tentativa aqui presente consiste em ir além do cânone patente nas performances geralmente conhecidas, aquelas peças icónicas que figuram nos manuais, alargando assim horizontes através da inclusão de artistas não oriundos das capitais do modernismo, embora igualmente provenientes dos chamados primeiro e segundo mundos, deixando ainda todo o Sul de fora. A história ainda não chegou ao fim.
A historiadora de arte e comissária Angelika Richter fez uma breve apresentação da situação política e cultural da Alemanha de Leste, antes da queda do Muro, considerando que esta deve ser tida em conta quando se pensa nas artes visuais e especialmente na obra de algumas mulheres artistas daquele período: “Todos os artistas tinham um inimigo comum, que era o Estado. A emancipação da mulher era um tema secundário. O principal objectivo consistia em libertar o género humano em geral”.
Dubravka Djuric, escritora, professora universitária e co-fundadora da revista ProFemina não pôde participar pessoalmente no seminário, pelo que a sua comunicação foi apresentada pela artista Lana Zdravkovic /KITSCH. Esta debruçou-se sobre a (im)possibilidade de uma compreensão (ou leitura) universal da arte da Europa de Leste, por oposição à arte ocidental, dando exemplos colhidos nas obras de Abramovic, Ladik e Delimar, da antiga Jugoslávia.
A última comunicação foi apresentada por Barbara Borcic do SCCA, de Liubliana, que efectuou uma apresentação geral do acervo, abordando a questão do arquivo e o problema do arquivamento de obras de vídeo ou de outros documentos filmados de arte ao vivo, como a performance.
Um dos eventos paralelos à exposição foi a projecção da performance-video de Lana Zdravkovic /KITSCH, intitulada: How she enjoys: Naked Reading of Lacan. O vídeo constitui uma reflexão acerca do prazer (sexual) feminino, tal como este é interpretado pela psicanálise lacaniana. O autor surge no vídeo a ler o texto de Lacan Mais, abordando problemas políticos contemporâneos através do fenómeno do prazer, não apenas no que diz respeito à condição da mulher, mas sobretudo assinalando o crescente chauvinismo e machismo disseminados na sociedade como um todo, através da cultura (pop), da arte, da ciência e da economia. As filosofias políticas de Balibar, Rancière e Badiou fundamentam a acusação de que as sociedades ditas democráticas caem facilmente nas profundezas do chauvinismo, racismo e nacionalismo. Assim, Zdravkovic pensa que a luta permanente pela igualdade dos sexos não constitui apenas uma reivindicação feminista, inscrevendo-se numa irredutível exigência de igualdade, não só no que diz respeito ao sexo, mas também à nacionalidade, etnicidade, raça e cultura. Assim, o carácter explícito da imagem (da vagina) nesta peça não se oferece como uma metáfora estética, sendo antes empregue como um símbolo emancipatório. Esta peça pode assim ser lida como uma reivindicação radical de igualdade.
Assinale-se ainda que, simultaneamente, um outro lacaniano, de origem eslovena, está a organizar o Colóquio Sobre a Ideia de Comunismo, no Birbeck Instute for Humanities, em Londres (que se encontra completamente cheio).
A exposição re.act feminism, constitui um evento prévio integrado na programação do festival City of Women de Liubliana. Esta mostra foi inaugurada em Dezembro, em Berlim e encontra-se actualmente em viagem pela Europa.

Western Union: Small Boats by Isaac Julien

Museu do Chiado(Temporary Exhibitions)
30.10.2008-1.2.2009

Western Union closes Julien's trilogy of audiovisual film installations that began with True North (2004) and continued with Fantôme Afrique (2005).
All three works deal with post-colonial condition, newly established global relations and their consequences, tackle philosophical questions, as well as racial and gender issues, and add to all this the frenzy of contemporary dance.
The trilogy delves deep into the cinema culture and suspense, fusing fiction and documentary genres into a dense entity and refusing linear story-telling common to most examples of film production, in order to give space to fragmented, parallel, multi-voiced, non-linear narration.
The simultaneous projections on multiple screens make it impossible to grasp everything at the same time. There is no singular, all-encompassing viewpoint in a Foucauldian sense and therefore no totalizing effect – instead, a single story made up of individual corresponding pieces and consisting of many intertwined stories is created, different every time we watch it. In this case the visitor is not merely a passive receptor, but rather an active editor of the material proposed by the artist.
The videos of Isaac Julien – and the same can be observed in the current production by other artists – are not time-based anymore, but rather local-specific (in this case genus loci is the Mediterranean sea), which is contrary to 'neutral' video works from past decades. Being decidedly spatial in their scope and display, space re-emerges here as a paradigm.
Western Union, named after a company that provides rapid (almost real-time) money transactions between Western Europe and the rest of the world, a system used on a daily basis by immigrants from Africa, Brazil or Eastern Europe, who send money to their families and pay a more or less high tax for this service, depending on the amount and country selected, is a work exploring the notion of journeying from the opposite direction, where the tax to be paid is much higher.
More precisely, it is the story of workers from Sub-Saharan Africa who cross the Mediterranean in small fishing boats heading towards Sicily to escape the wars or famine, looking for a better life. Some (if not most) of these economic immigrants never reach their destination nor return to their native lands.
The work was conceived in collaboration with the contemporary dance choreographer Russell Malliphant and relies on the appearance of an enigmatic woman, who marks her presence throughout the entire trilogy in the manner of ghosts. It seems she is invisible to everyone except to the visitor. A specter of a kind.
There are also some remarking sequences, such as men crawling under the water surface, supported by a powerful soundtrack made of undistinguishable electronic beats in crescendo, which refers to drowning men and their desperate attempt to survive.
The video suddenly cuts into another scene and the pace slows down, we see/hear water dripping and an intruder – a woman who becomes a witness.
The devastation is contrasted by the grandeur of Palazzo Gangi (the famed location from Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard), which is full of rumors and this is where the black magic woman finds herself in, unfocused and invisible in front of the confident and greedy blond beast (a lady) and in the midst of and ambient highlighting the presumed European supremacy of the past centuries.
She walks between the luxury gathered on colonial and religious quests; chandeliers, clocks on which time has frozen, and absurd amounts of gold, while men (somehow out of place in this setting) roll down the staircase or struggle on ceramic tiles that bear a visual testimony of European history, a history of violence. A colonial history and the representations of the Other, half-human, half-beast.
The fishing boats are left to rot in a junkyard in the Sicilian village Agrigento.
For a long time we are left watching the ruby red cloth floating in the water, at the same time beautiful and scary, that turns out to be an immigrant's T-shirt.
A few meters away from the white sandy beaches, where locals and tourists lie undisturbed, are corpses of men covered with shiny silver aluminum foil.
Do we exist only as a mirage of ourselves as is suggested in another sequence?
Or is it that we continuously see and project that which doesn't exist?
These uncanny moments perpetuate thru the entire work and leave the visitor with an ambiguous feeling, despite of the beauty of the imagery, yet unseen.

Western Union: Small Boats de Isaac Julien

Museu do Chiado, no âmbito do Festival Temps d’images

Western Union encerra a trilogia de instalações audiovisuais da autoria de Isaac Julien que teve início com True North (2004) e prosseguiu com Fantôme d’Afrique (2005). Estas obras lidam com a condição pós-colonial, com o estabelecimento de novas relações globais e com as suas consequências, levantando questões filosóficas e explorando o tema da raça e do género, sendo ainda enriquecidas por uma frenética dança contemporânea.
As obras partem de uma intensa pesquisa na área do cinema e do suspense, fundindo o género ficcional com o género documental, compondo uma entidade densa que se recusa a contar uma história de forma linear, como habitualmente sucede na produção cinematografíca, dando lugar a uma narração fragmentada, paralela, polifónica e não-linear.
As projecções simultâneas em diversas telas tornam impossível captar tudo ao mesmo tempo. Não é possível encontrar aqui um ponto de vista único e panóptico, no sentido foucaultiano. Não estamos aqui perante uma composição totalizante, mas sim diante de várias peças relativas a uma história (feita de diversas histórias entretecidas) que é diferente de cada vez que é vista. Deste modo, o visitante não constitui um mero receptor passivo, mas sim um editor activo do material fornecido pelo artista.
Os vídeos de Isaac Julien não obedecem a uma lógica temporal, o que também se verifica no trabalho de outros artistas contemporâneos, embora possuam um referente espacial específico (neste caso, o mar Mediterrâneo), contrariamente à tendência das últimas décadas para apresentar trabalhos de vídeo “neutrais”. O espaço re-emerge assim como um paradigma nestas obras cujo objectivo e desenvolvimento é deliberadamente situado.
O título da obra remete para a instituição financeira com o mesmo nome, a Western Union, que organiza transferências de dinheiro entre a Europa Ocidental e o resto do mundo, as quais são constantemente efectuadas por imigrantes provenientes de África, do Brasil ou da Europa de Leste que assim enviam dinheiro às suas famílias, pagando por este serviço um preço maior ou menor, consoante a quantia e o país. Esta obra, contudo, debruça-se sobre a viagem que é efectuada em sentido contrário, para a qual o preço a pagar é bem mais elevado.
Assim, conta-se nesta obra a história dos trabalhadores oriundos da África subsaariana que atravessam o Mediterrâneo em pequenos barcos de pesca, em direcção à Sicília, procurando fugir à fome e à guerra, em busca de uma vida melhor. Alguns destes migrantes económicos, se não a maioria, ou não atingem sequer o seu objectivo ou então nunca regressam.
Esta obra foi concebida em parceria com o coreógrafo de dança contemporânea Russel Malliphant e conta com a participação de uma mulher enigmática que assombra toda a trilogia como um fantasma. Essa mulher parece ser invisível para todos, menos para o visitante. Como um espectro.
Assinalem-se ainda algumas sequências notáveis como aquela em que se vêem alguns homens a nadar debaixo de água, que é acompanhada por uma poderosa banda sonora, constituída por batidas electrónicas em crescendo, impossíveis de distinguir, que remetem para o afogamento daqueles homens e para a sua desesperada tentativa de sobreviver.
Esta cena é subitamente cortada, dando lugar a outra na qual o ritmo abranda e se assiste a um fio de água a pingar e ao surgimento de um intruso, uma mulher que se torna numa testemunha.
À visão da devastação é agora confrontada a grandeza do Palazzo Gangi (célebre cenário da obra prima de Visconti, O Leopardo), povoado por sussurros, onde se encontra a 'black magic woman', desfocada e invisível, diante de um monstro confiante e ávido, uma mulher loura, remetendo este ambiente para a suposta superioridade europeia dos últimos séculos. A mulher caminha por um ambiente luxuoso que evoca os tempos coloniais e uma atitude religiosa; os candelabros, os relógios nos quais o tempo parou e quantidades absurdas de ouro. Por outro lado, os homens (de algum modo deslocados neste cenário) descem pela escadaria ou debatem-se em cerâmicas que patenteiam um testemunho visual da história europeia, uma história de violência; uma história colonial, feita de representações do Outro, figurando-o como meio-humano, ou meio-animal.
Os barcos de pesca apodrecem em depósitos de sucata na cidade siciliana de Agrigento. Durante bastante tempo somos levados a observar um pano vermelho-rubi que flutua na água, simultaneamente belo e assustador, que se descobre ser a camisola do imigrante. A alguns metros de distância das praias de areia branca onde habitantes locais e turistas repousam calmamente, encontram-se os cadáveres daqueles homens, cobertos por folhas de alumínio, brilhantes como prata.Existiremos apenas como miragens de nós próprios, como numa outra sequência se sugere?Será que constantemente vemos e projectamos aquilo que não existe?
Estes momentos perturbadores prosseguem ao longo de toda a peça, entregando o visitante a um sentimento ambíguo, apesar da beleza das imagens, até então nunca vista.