The Hole

four channel video installation, 2011
SD-NTSC, stereo sound 30′ (loop)

The Hole (midwife, mith, silence)
three channel
video installation, 30' (loop)
video SD-NTSC, stereo sound
sound design: Ricardo Cortés

The Hole
one channel
video installation, 5'17'' (loop)
video SD-NTSC, stereo sound
sound composition:
Ricardo Cortés

In collaboration with Marie-Christine Camus

The Hole is a video installation about the politics of memory and oblivion; about relations between historic narratives and place. The starting point is an event that took place during World War II on a Croatian island of Solta. A group of partisans executed some of the inhabitants of the island, throwing them into the hole of Rudine, a natural sink hole located in the centre of the island. Our collaboration on this project was motivated by the fact that in that time both of us lived in Mexico and had some common interests in topics of memory, oral history and identity construction. In 2008 we collected testimonies from the inhabitants of the island, images and documents to produce an archive for this project. http://sites.google.com/site/viajealaisla/

The video installation consists of four video projections. Three simultaneous projections form a triptych that articulate different perspectives of this event: the personal statements about the death of the midwife Tonka Antunović, the only woman victim, the mythical stories that inhabit the imagination of people, and the silence that connects past and present.

A fourth projection with a different visual treatment is also shown, where the camera is lowered by hand with rope into the sink hole. Due to the action of lowering the camera by hand held rope random images and accidents caused by the uncontrolled movement of the device paired with a reconstruction of ambient sound confronts the viewer with the invisible.