Mohamed Bourouissa
Temps mort - Film - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Film
There's this something fragile about this project, in keeping with the fragility and fugacity of its very process of realization. the film was shot with the aid of someone in prison and is essentially a kind of mobile-phone correspondence between one individual "inside" and a second "outside". if i underline the word fragility, it's because it equates to the whole idea of the project. The piece foregrounds the at once close and detached relationship between two individuals, one free and the other locked up: on the one side, a real human relationship, and, on the other, digital communication: on the one side, a penal system predicated on placing the individual in a position of primitive isolation, on withdrawing it into an enclosed space, and, on the other, the freedom of movement, the profusion of information that makes one a member of the "media community." One then enters a hors-champ, a non-zone, a sort of free space. At the same time, we have an encounter between two temporalities, one slowed down, halted, frozen by the prison environment; and the other, dazzling, speeded-up, and constantly in motion. this is the reason i chose as my title, Temps mort.
