Willing to die
Seven-channel video with asynchronous sound, color
Various durations, looped
2016
Willing to die is a video installation that repurposes footage from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. The original film functions as an analogue to contemporary social and political conditions, showing the interconnectedness of Los Angeles and its desert surroundings; the ideologies that develop when an urban space is squeezed between mountains, desert, and sea; and the forms of escape that are enacted in response to this pressure (flight, formalism, murder, protest, collaboration). Willing to die is the first in a series of videos and installations that charts out the latter day resonances of flight from militarized urban space, and the rejection of political engagement in favor of a mythic transcendentalism. This installation is centered around the experience of Daria, a barely sketched out female protagonist. The central projection, which is projected twice (once on each side of a suspended projection screen) is a time-warped edit of the film’s last moments, in which Daria wanders through a modernist desert home, observing real estate moguls carve up the desert on a map, and finally retreats to the paragon of private space in the American west, her car, from which she imagines the structure exploding in all its detail. The trappings of middle class American mid-century are each meticulously exploded in a shaky slow motion that, in my edit, has been stretched to the point where still and moving image begin to blur into each other. Each of these six explosion sequences occupies its own projection, with the six projections arrayed in a hexagon around the central Daria narrative.