Day Eleven: Sleight of Hand
Today has been spent splicing together scenes, sounds and text, in this case, excerpts from Dante’s Broken Hammer by Graham Harman. Although there is reading around the work – and this is where the installation begins – my hope is that the research is not hung or projected on the walls. So, while it is necessary to add this text now – for whatever reason – The sequencing and pace will be rearranged, and most of this will probably be cut and set to a different rhythm. While I’d hope that any text will work within the overall structure, it must also function autonomously, allowing for points of departure for chains of association – somewhere between documentary, psychoanalytic session and cinematic experience.
Harman reminds us that Inferno is dominated by fraud. Indeed, the Inferno is as subtle as possible in distinguishing between numerous different forms of fraud, making it almost a world of its own. He suggests that the nature of fraud is to fabricate the appearance of a love that is actually non-existent, akin to the infamous email scams of our own day: “My name is Tesoro, the only survivor from a family of nine. I narrowly escaped from the tsunami disaster which affected my eardrum and claimed the life of my entire family.” The pantomime of a disaster to manoeuvre a sleight of hand…
FOLLOW THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS RESIDENCY ON