Dissolution

Plan fixe sur le large, le cadre de l’image délimite un espace dans lequel glisse des navires aux contours flous, spectres presque immobiles, aux trajectoires incertaines. L’activité humaine est perçue de loin, à travers les traces d’une activité maritime. Cette vidéo prend un point de vue particulier, la caméra étant placée derrière une zone de flou. Lentement, nous expérimentons la perception d’un temps dilaté. Une attente se crée et se résout dans l’observation du passage des bateaux qui se dissolvent dans les nébulosités, et disparaissent à nos yeux tel un mirage.

A short, looped video sequence intends to place the viewer in the position of an Algerian, perhaps a child, gazing across the Bay of Algiers where the occident is described as ‘blured like a fiction’. In the background haze lie stationary tankers out of focus. In the foreground the tops of two industrial chimneys exhaust heat and smoke into the middle-ground of this seascape, where a colourful tanker traverses the screen as it makes its turn into port. Just as the tip of the ship touches the chimney vapour, a small tug enters the screen from the left-hand side. The miniature guide escorts the flaming colossus as it liquefies through industrial heat. Katia describes this event as a ‘transition’ as the tanker enters the orient. The dissolution of the ship is echoed by a wall of sound that engulfs the viewer in the installation. The sound is the audio equivalent of the visual evidence of heat emanating from the chimneys: a discordant and meditative hum. Dissolution uses the moving image to demonstrate where radical opposites momentarily fuse.