"In the films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one's own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself." *
This work shows a video projected on a curtain suspended in a room. The video consists of many scenes taken from found footage of films that have intensely scared or shocked me in the past, many of them aren't horror films. In total an amount of around fifty films have been included. Specifically the work contains the scenes that I wasn't able to watch, the scenes that were so disturbing in their content that I would have to put my hands in front of my face to obscure them. This is what the blurring of the footage does for the viewer in this work.
"As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible."**
It is very difficult for me to be scared by an image in film now, I have been numbed by seeing so many of the scenes like the ones that have been included here. This seems to be typical for my generation. It can be seen in the increasing tolerance for extremely violent scenes in mainstream movies. It even seems that the need to see these images has increased, a new genre of 'torture-porn' that includes films such as Saw and Hostel, is very popular.
I've done everything I can to remove the poison from these images, to make them harmless, to make it possible for the viewer to rationally consider what it is we see here. Is it just the preposterous image of our own death that fascinates us? In the work the images that were once sharp and dangerous are now soft and as absorbing as a light show. I find it fascinating that the images that for many viewers of the work would have been impossible to watch are now mesmerising even though we can occasionally recognise disturbing elements of the original footage, like screaming faces or reaching hands.
"Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin spectres For one job that fantasy can do is to lift out of the unbearable humdrum and to distract us from terrors - real or anticipated - by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings. But another of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In one case fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it."*
*From Susan Sontag's 'Imaginations of disaster' (1965)
**From Susan Sontag's 'Regarding the Pain of Others' (2003)