Excavation of Betrayal
13 min, Matera, Italy, 2024Excerpt - 2min
A diasporic body is a body that has left,
A diasporic body is a body that stayed,
when everyone else has left.
“Excavation of betrayal” is a black and white one-channel video installation about the sorrow of an abandoned old man in Basilicata.
The only man who decided to stay to take care of the ruins.
Becoming and being the ruin.
A man transformed into a ruin, a social, physical, economical and emotional ruin.
An erosed stone full of wounds.
The video installation is part of a corpus of work called "The Aristocracy of Pariahs" which delves into the representation of Intimate Sorrow as Political Insurrection, and the figure of the abandoned individual as a catalyst for this sedition and liberation.
The tragic sorrow and melancholy of the film is crystallized in the wound of the betrayal that the situation of Basilicata has intimately created, the sorrow of the one who has been marginalized and then abandoned, and how this deeply intimate feeling will evolve, be transformed and take root elsewhere.
Moreover, there is a possibility that this experience of sorrow may reach a critical mass, evolve into a political insurrection, and converge with the sorrow of diasporic bodies from the global south, forming a collective consciousness of despair that challenges the established social order.
©2024 Nabil Aniss