The Dragon’s Tail
2021
Video installation, 6’36’’, looped
For my film "The Dragon’s Tail", I wrote and recorded my reading of a visually dense poem, overflowing with descriptions of textures, characters and locations, before transcribing it into subtitles over a black screen. Beyond the voice-over narration, the landscape is absent: the black screen - in fact a film recording of a black panel - and its almost unnoticeable static-like digital noise evoke an image being shaped as the piece progresses, threatening to surge at any moment.
The voice reciting the poem is ethereal yet distorted, saturated, as if sharing a secret through a walkie-talkie or during a radio transmission. Although the viewer is denied visual identification with the narrator or the subject, the voice seemingly possess the ability to move through time and space. Reflecting on our collective visual memory and shared experience of immobility during the Covid-19 pandemic, the piece dips into the world’s endless sensory possibilities while questioning if imagining something can be as truthful as experiencing it in reality.
Email maxime@maximefauconnier.com for a private link to the film.
