THE WHITE MATTER

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2021, 00:15:00

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : action, Allegory

Summary :
<p>&ldquo;All media are extensions of some human faculty, psychic or physical&rdquo;<br />(Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is The Message, 1967)<br /><br />The video White Matter places its main character in a forest. A single man appears, turning his back to the camera, squatting in the middle of a pile of torn books and ripped-out book pages. The character stands up and starts juggling with the books from the ground, bending down every time one of them falls from his hands, then continues to juggle. From time to time, footage of a surgical operation interrupts the forest scene. One can see the expert hands of surgeons conducting an operation under general anesthetic, exploring the flesh of a patient deep in artificial sleep with their surgical tools.</p>
<p>In this video, Mounir Fatmi studies the impact of modern technologies on memory while questioning the obsolescence of media. Techno-scientific progress has led to the rapid substitution of analog media, surpassed by digital images as society becomes increasingly virtual. The artist thus brings back to life anachronistic and formerly glorified devices such as books, in order to question the revolution of images and media that deeply modified our perception of the world and distorted our sense of memory. The title of the video refers to the white matter present in our brain that is responsible for the propagation of information through the nervous system. Just like the root systems of trees, this type of tissue is composed of millions of communication cables, each one containing a single long thread, the axon, enshrouded in a white substance, myelin, whose function is to facilitate the transmission of signals.</p>

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