DIEU ME PARDONNE

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2004, 00:08:09

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Allegory, Religion, Society, Television

Summary :
This video was made using images recorded between 2001 and 2004. Most of these images were collected during a workshop in which the participants were invited to record their own TV zapping among the channels available worldwide. One "hadith" (i.e. a saying quoted from the prophet Mahomet) about women is used as a unifying thread: "The first look at a woman is for yourself, the second for the devil and the third is a crime." Those looks are directed towards the images generated by TV and show us how repetition effects, slow motion effects along with the poorness of the images in the news turn us into Peeping Toms. Television thus puts us in an ambiguous situation and insidiously triggers an almost erotic pleasure when watching these appalling yet strangely beautiful images.

The third look is explored here – the guilty, and somehow complicit, look of the voyeur that we all become as we become accustomed to the escalation of television violence, forgetting the real dramas that are exposed. Fascinated by the beauty of disaster, the spectator-voyeur finds an echo here of the monster that sleeps in all of us. He finds the expression of this “banality of evil”, to take Hannah Arendt's paradox, which, far from founding ideologies and profound free convictions, pushes men towards crimes that are as
ordinary as they are.

The sampled images, torn from their context, clash, seep into and consume each other. Like a kaleidoscope of snap shots of the present, they offer an endoscopic vision of an angry world, an aesthetic and aestheticized vision of the worst. Erotic images, images of arms and war, prophets and terrorists, abstract images like moving paintings, images of guns and disasters, flights and divisions, executioners and victims... in the frenetic rhythm of this jumble of images captured on screen, everything seems to be the same, without issues or depth, and everything seems catastrophic, from the trivial to the most violent. Mounir fatmi seems to contrast another form of relativism to this, confronted with religions, truth, the media, the scope of History and the real
weight of individual destinies.

At the same time, a certain radical spirituality comes out of May God forgive me, the idea of a world in physical and metaphysical effervescence, on the edge of implosion, caught in a dialectical whirlwind in which violence and desire, good will and radical evil merge and dissolve all the structures of the world.

Translation: Caroline Rossiter.

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