Divide
One often hears that “everything is political” in conclusion to debates. Divide attends to a reverse logic: the work’s starting point is a dialogue on the impossibilities of direct political action lifted from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. This dialogue was flattened and neutered out of all acting competences thanks to A.I. voice software, and then re-enacted in front of a camera by a man and a woman in Karaoke-like sessions. The best of these takes are jump-cut together, with faces anonymised and the dialogue keywords bleeped out as per broadcast standards.
Displayed on two facing screens so that a viewer is trapped in a crossfire of interjections and only able to see one screen at a time. The exchange is pared back to an argument at its most archetypal and generic, while the premise reduces to a two-note binary lilt—a divide that could be about anything at all, or for that matter, about everything.
Installation with dual channel HD video w. sound on two facing screens, 6’30”, 2025.
