CARGO

Daniel Demoustier shot all these pictures of war victims. He made a selection and gave them to me for the Warum 2.0 project. After viewing the pictures I selected 25 of them. Obviously I chose pictures that were ’strong’ visually, with victims looking straight in the cameralens. Daniel told me, these people were fascinated by the camera. So, it might well be the case that the typical ‘victim’ look has nothing to do with the victimhood, the situation of the victim, more more so with the unique moment of encounter between a person in mysery and a camera and man giving all the sudden complete, concentrated attention. That may be the real information of these shots. The magic of imaging. And this process gets even stronger and more intensified during the Warum 2.0 build-up, as I started to ‘photoshop’ this original footage by Daniel, in order to enhance the photographic quality of the projected pictures even more. So, there is a processing going on from victim to recording to selection to enhancing the visual impact. In the end a (media) spectacle is getting formed, generating a presence and reality of its own. The only thing an observer can do, from now onwards, is to start relating these media to reality. However the second ‘reality’ has to be filled in, or re-invented. It could be the victims again, the original reality of the pictures that is, but it could also be the inner feeling/world of the visitor, or any other content or program… That is how it works, I think, media that is.