Installation view @ Borås Art Museum, Sweden

Medusa is an experimental 360 short film about the contemporary crisis of Europe’s identity. This immersive experience has an hybrid format that hints at video art, performance art, choreography and sound art. The storytelling style is the result of a critical approach to immersive filmmaking conducted with the freedom to experiment in order to speculate on new cinematic format.

The script lies on the border between facts and fiction and draws its narrative from actual news, social media, EU documents and interviews. Medusa immerses the viewer in a surreal chains of events: a murdering in a museum, a lady spitting an apple, young men climbing ladders. An old Diva, Miss Europe, inhabits a dark space waiting to open a show that will never happen. A garbled french male voice bursts in time to time, it speaks from an undefined source as it were an interference from the past. Indeed those are audio fragments taken from a conferences about the “ Future of European Civilisation” held in 1956 in Athen by Albert Camus.

Medusa is the second stage of an artistic research on the consequences that the massive immigrants flows are causing to European stronghold and it questions the regress and loss of memory of a culture. The film project focuses on the contemporary rising of disused ideology that are catching on Europe’s political debates and questions the process that shapes public opinion and shared ideology.

By means of immersive technology, the treatment of Medusa follows a post-truth logic and aimsto depict the condition of human being in a hyper-mediated society, where presence and experience aren’t anymore strictly linked to a physical space, and where reality and fiction definitely overlapped.

MEDUSA EXHIBITION
curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist
31.1 - 11.8.2019  Borås Art Museum, Sweden

360 4K stereoscopic video, ambisonic sound, color, 10’ 15’’, 2018

360 4K stereoscopic video, ambisonic sound, color, 8’ 58’’,  2018

 me for private links to the VR experiences

Medusa is a 360-degree video work that is experienced with a virtual-reality headset. It describes a Europe in crisis, and the events in the film mix fact with fiction. Sara Tirelli has used current news, social media, EU documents and interviews to portray the identity of the EU and the prevailing situation for people seeking asylum.

The title of the work refers to the Greek myth about the gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turned people into stone. It also suggests the historic painting by Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), which is a depiction of the survivors of a shipwreck and how people are the victims of poor decisions made by the rulers. The Raft of the Medusa, in turn, has similarities with contemporary images of refugees who risk their lives on the way to Europe, while people in Europe are paralysed watching the events unfold on their TV screens. There is an obvious link between the painting and today’s media images of the refugee situation.

A large part of Medusa was filmed at the Borås Museum of Modern Art. A total of 63 mainly local actors participated. Among other projects, Sara Tirelli has collaborated with Agape, an NGO for unaccompanied minors.
JONATAN HABIB ENGQVIST