Icarus
HD video, 02:26minsound
english intertitles
A video piece referring to the myth of Icarus. A drone - an instrument of surveillance, armed with a camera that provides visual evidence. In this case it became a protagonist by being transfigured into Icarus, whose desire of seeing everything from god's perspective led him to tragedy.
In my work I used a fragment of Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life.
Icarus, 2018. HD video, color, sound, 2min 26 sec. Video still
An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below.
His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God.
The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.
(Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p.92.)
View of the exhibition Given: 1° The Shower / 2° The Sun (2018), Contemporary Theatre in Szczecin. Photo: Kamil Macioł