The Death of K9 Cigo
2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
23:00 minutes
Emmanuel van der Auwera
Emmanuel van der Auwera visited Miami at the end of 2017 and was working on a project relating to school shootings. Two months later, on 14 February 2018, 19 year old Nicolas Cruz killed 17 people and injured 17 others in a shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Van de Auwera began to follow videos uploaded to the Periscope App, a live broadcasting channel that closed in March 2021, downloading them and creating a bank of data that would otherwise disappear, as material on Periscope was self-deleting after a short period of time. After doing this for a year he began to edit the videos into what seems like a seamless film about gun crime, its impact on a community, the varying attitudes to gun violence in the US (Miami specifically), the politicization of the concept of freedom, and the way in which sentiment can help to cover up dysfunctionality. In the artist’s video, titled The Death of K9 Cigo , the America that van der Auwera highlights is one where the shooting of a police dog seems to be a bigger and more emotional event than the murder of 17 children. While the massacre was only in the conventional news for a few days, it remained a topic in people’s lives and on Periscope for more than a year. The film captures the intimacy of moments in people’s lives, their selfie confessions, their fears and sadness, and their strategies for dealing with ruptures. The film’s point of view is that of an intruder attempting to reconstruct a narrative and a context for crime, using video fragments to create a sense of urgency. The scenes are raw, moving, funny, personal, and authentic; the kind of material that is excluded from media coverage, but to which the internet gives agency.
Emmanuel van der Auwera is interested in conspiracy theories, surveillance photography and its ubiquity, giving texture to major events that are frequently smoothed out by media reporting. He shows the diversity of humanity and its vulnerability. He takes footage that he finds on the internet and uses it to focus on the unseen, the unheard, the threatening and the violent, as well as the absurdity of life and powerlessness in the face of forces beyond the control of individuals. While he sometimes focuses on the fatalistic, his work also gives hope that ultimately human values do prevail. He questions how mass media images operate and construct new narratives, restoring a sense of humanity to dehumanizing events and the subsequent reports of such events.
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