MOSHE CHEN
ART
2015
IMINT - (Imagery Intelligence Collection Management )
Media video installation, Super 8mm projectors
The space is composed of a super-8 mm camera film set, a bequest of old family films forgotten in a box in a flea market that I accidentally found. I paid for the box only 60 New Israeli Shekels (NIS). That is all what memories are worth for.
The film runs through the projectors, stretched between the visitors’ heads. The anonymous persons whose image is being screened are no long here. All that is left of them has been burnt on the deserted film and in the depths of the memories of their loved ones.
Webs of partial knowledge and the fringes of remembrance fuse in this labyrinth of subjective memory to fragment the processes of immortalization to which we have been accustomed. The films avoid a chronological narrative. They include segmented pieces of life, the fractured quotidian, tempos, places and encounters that evade any attempt to discipline and organize them. Piece by piece, the shards of memory are integrated as a process of ‘intelligence collection’, which takes place through listening and the acceptance of the random vagrancy that surges from the filmed material. Precisely the anonymity that characterizes these films and the lack of a pronounced documentary position create intimacy and identification. The space in the room does no impel a ready-made format of identification.
The traditional function of a cinematographic film is the production of images. The cinema is thus perceived as a temporal, immaterial medium, which is mainly composed of a stream of images and the flashing of lights. Diverting the attention from the projected image to the spatial-sculptural possibility of the film allows for the merging of artistic languages that are usually perceived as contradictory. Relocating the image as a tangible element with concrete materiality enables the oppositional dialogue between these languages. By walking through the space the visitors create a multiplicity, which interact with the constant transposition of matter into image and vice-versa. In every given moment it is possible to experience different dimensions of memory, longing, wonderment and yearning; while relating these elements of human existence to the temporality, finitude and ultimate destruction that is our final destiny.
