Florence, Cinema Odeon, November 21 2012
DAYS, I See What I Saw and What I Will See was filmed in 2011 by Franco-Armenian artist Melik Ohanian for the Sharjah Biennial and was presented in Florence as part of the 5th edition of Lo Schermo dell’Arte Film Festival, in the Mobiles section.
The film’s structure is very simple: two separate videos, projected on both sides of a structure built in the center of the main projection room at CANGO – Cantieri Goldonetta Firenze – show viewers the footage shot in a dormitory/camp in the desert, on the outskirts of Dubai. On one side, day-time footage; on the other, film shot at night.
The camera, installed on a 100-meter-long system of tracks, recorded everything in front of it by day and at night. For 12 days, the artist wandered the camp’s streets, filming the inhabitants and taking in the rhythms, setting up and then dismantling the 100 meters of track necessary to the work each day and night.
In this interview, conducted by Radio Papesse and Felpa Video in the spaces of CANGO, Melik Ohanian explains how DAYS, by going beyond the traditional borders of film, is a work in which the viewer becomes both screen and projector, in which time and space are both separate and superimposed.
What appears to be a continuous tracking shot is the result of physical editing: where the track ends, the track begins; as it does the next day, for the next sequence. The spectator–by moving through space–becomes the film’s “editor”, completing the information received from one side of the screen with that gathered on the opposite side.
The interview is in English.