Desert (excerpt)
full film 16:40 min, sound, produced during a residency at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts of St Petersburg, Russia, 2019
“Like a fanatic who swallows the desert, I require from music the desert. The desert of colors. The desert of words.” said Malevich. Presented as a mental map, Desert is made with photographs of rectangles painted on building walls, commonly called “buffs” in Russian. Their function is to make unwanted words disappear.
The images scroll to the rhythm of a tic-toc that I recorded in the same city as the photographs, St Petersburg. During the second world war loudspeakers were installed on every street to alert citizens of bomb attacks. Between the attacks the time was materialized by the metronome tic-toc, meant to relax the population. Today this sound is regularly played for a short time to test the speakers.