Topsoil
2003 | installation | polystyrene sheets sculpture, three monitors on a structure, headphones | video: 8’10 | English or Hebrew
The video consists of three short chapters:
“ Come With Me ” (3:00 min) - which refers to the optical illusion common to the desert - the mirage,
“ We Are Busy Creating A Desert, Which We Can Then Call Peace ” (2:40 min) - which describes the incident of shooting down a Libyan civillian aircraft that mistakenly strayed over the Sinai desert in 1973.
And “ A Report Of An Affected Country ” ( 2:10 min) which depicts a state fighting the desertification of its landscape.
The three pieces illustrate a story of a desert, an associative path from a distant and tempting place, through confrontation with reality, to a scientific, sober analysis, whose conclusion leads back to the starting point.
The installation is made of two elements; a video trilogy displayed in three monitors and a sculpture - a model of desert landscape made of polystyrene sheets, which served as a set for the video piece. The video is completely artificial; the landscape is a synthetic model of a desert, and all other visuals in the video are either images downloaded from internet or pure digital manipulations.
The three monitors form a circle, like the "loop" suggested by the content of the work.
Topsoil, 2003 - excerpt from effi and amir on Vimeo.