/ states of documents (il bando) | video | 2012

States of documents is a series of 11 sequences of 1 minute each. The footage was recorded between November 27 and 28 in 2011 and refers to documents found in an abandoned building of the mining plant San Giovanni in Iglesias on the island Sardinia:
in particular reports of accidents made by the company medical officer and an official communication published 1977 by INPS, the Italian national istitute for social security, concerning the rules of retirement for mining workers.
Excerpts from these documents were read and recorded on their find spots. The attitude of the camera is formal, looking for discernible structures, for some evidence able to emerge (by itself). These fragments of past realities, the names of the workers,
the situations they were involved in, the implicit hard facts behind the rules of early retirement or pension after death, e.g., become then an off-text for more video footage, played-back or re-read on two different locations: the almost abandoned miners village of Montevecchio,
where the play-back is choked down by the wind despite the use of a megaphone, and the community of Buggerru, a former miners foundation as well, where the text is read by a municipal employee in charge for official public announcements, and amplified through the
local public voice system. The repeated let's say »public making« of the documents is somehow an exercise of reenactment: witnesses of the actions and viewers of the video can ask themselves about the realities behind the view detectable facts the piece is build on.

keywords: public address | post-modernity | identities.