The CHOIR   2015, HD Video single channel video installation, 6 min 45 sec., commissioned by the Greek Film Archives and ESPA and was premiered during the international forum Images of Crisis. May 2015 Athens, Greece.

In the fall of 2014 I was invited by ARTifariti to visit and film in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Western Sahara. Close to 200,000 Sahrawi are displaced in harsh desert camps in SW Algeria near Tintouf and for 40 years are dependent on international aid to survive while all their land and natural resources like fisheries and phosphate have been taken over and exploited by the Moroccans.

 

The CHOIR is an experimental work and its conception speaks to a certain degree to the Sahrawi tradition where human voice and three children voices and singing is from an early age a form of resistance against their occupation from the Moroccans and their lament for their exile from their land.

 

The CHOIR is built using footage that I shot while traveling through the tented settlements of the Sahrawi refugee camps overlapping with images, video clips, and audiovisual material mined from the avalanches of visual data found on You tube, TV news broadcasts, mobile smart phones and IPods As an artist interested to explore the intersection of reality and fiction using the tools of cinematic language along with a number of strategies during montage the video emphasizes the increasingly precarious status of documentary content in the digital age and its paradoxical relationship between warfare and technological progress and how the image today is a condensation of social forces.