What have we done to the image? What it has done to us? What is this marriage between the eye and the seeing which has become this much spent and unstable? Every day, more thirsty than yesterday, we immerse ourselves inside the sea of images, yet we would not be sated. We can not get that pure satisfaction anymore by seeing any figures. The passion of the perception does not exist anymore. Everything right now, right at this moment, is born and dies. Like that bubble gum tattoo sticker that stays on the hand for a bit and after a short time fades away. Like the short life of an insect. Like the being of this video.
For us, who are only having an idea of a tragedy, who are creating an image from it, and are sharing it, the tragedy can exist as long as the spent “image”, no more and no less. But its naked reality is somewhere else. It is sitting on the heart of a person who is enduring time by looking at the imaginary image of their beloved ones. It exists in that silence after the phone turns off and that darkness before the sleep. It is in the dust that is wiped out from the picture frame of a lost loved. These are not to be seen, not to be pictured. These are not for everyone. The share that others gain from the sadness and happiness of individuals is little. Tragedies come after each other and we, only a little, for a moment, make love with their image until the next lover comes and replaces them.
Forgetfulness is a pain that likes a pandemic has conquered our souls. It has no cure nor a vaccine to even we wait for. Numb and insensible we are sitting in front of the fake light and looking at the birth and death of the image.
This video is the result of a one-year practice from the 8th of January, 2020, to the 8th of January, 2021. The black image which was being shared on Iran’s social media during the days after the Ukraine plane crash made us more sensitive to the question of the image and its contemporary values. So we decided to share a black image as a story on the chapchinstudio Instagram page every week. Each week we reduced the darkness of the image by 2% so that after 52 weeks, on the anniversary of the tragedy, our last story becomes all white. Moreover, we were continuously and randomly taking screenshots from the other stories on our friends’ Instagram pages. About 2000 images were collected within a year to be used in the video. This project was a very personal and deep experiment for us, especially in the year 2020, which passed with a lot of losses and sorrows for Iranians.
