Super Amuleto

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

7min55sec

Wisrah Villefort

---

This video is a montage of documentary and virtual images found on the Internet. They all have a performative dimension with varying registers of violence. The title – Super Amuleto – refers to the lucky charm of a rabbit’s foot. In Western symbolism it refers to fertility and therefore to prosperity and luck. It also alludes to one of the first relationships between man and animal in a conception of the animal as a ritual and divinatory object. It is a relationship that is based on violence however, like that of the animal thought of as food (also referenced by the fish at the start of the video) or the domesticated animal. The film’s text guides us towards the idea that a ritual presents a spiritual justification. This idea is reinforced by the translation of the text at the bottom of the image into an unknown language, reminiscent of emojis, which seems intended for another audience who remain invisible to us much like the magical language of Walter Benjamin. In certain sequences of the film, like those of the octopus on the face of a young woman or that of the drone with the eagle, there are relations of attraction / repulsion between man and animal, animal and machine which are ultimately also located within this register of violence.

---

Wisrah Villefort produces videos, installations and sculptures with a reflection on notions of the non-human, the increased presence of new digital technologies in our daily life, the use of synthetics polymers, prostheses and their markets. His work refers to current neo-materialist theories which confer existence to things with the idea that the relationship between man and objects – when their sensory materiality is recognized – can lead to productive alliances. It was Walter Benjamin who, very early on, claimed that the language of things is a “productive language” in the sense that it contains traces of origins and of God. The idea for him is that human language must be able to translate the meaning not by a ‘translation’ in the classical sense of the term but by a transfer, a transmission.

---

Colors:

---

• automaton.n.02
• materialism.n.02
• ritual.n.02
• kinship.n.02
• picture.n.01
• medium.n.10