Authentic News of Invisible Things

Directed by Rä di Martino

The video work Authentic News of Invisible Things is inspired directly by archive footage taken in the French City of Lille in 1918 which depicts a group of civilians gathered around a dummy tank abandoned by the retreating German army. Recreating and filming the historical scene in black and white, she pulls back switching to colour to reveal the cinematographer's devices. This contemporary footage is then interlaced with the original to create a complex dialogue between layers of reality, fiction and staging that simultaneously corroborate and mock one another. The effect is a reassuring distance between the observer and the image; a distance that the artist undermines in a further channel of video when a real tank is driven into the streets of the sleepy Italian town of Bolzano and the reactions of local inhabitants is recorded. This final gesture takes the work full circle, creating real encounters between people and an actual war machine but without the context of battle.