Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.
The work was inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:
Hearing things more than beings,
listening to the voice of fire,
the voice of water.
Hearing in wind the weeping bushes,
sighs of our forefathers.
The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps;
they’re in the hut, in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.
.. c’est vous sur la photo ????
la dernière? oui, c’est moi mais c’est assez flou
non!!!!!!
ha ha mistake, pas celle-là, pas moi du tout !!!!
en tout cas, ça lui va très bien d’être toute mouillée avec la bouche ouverte,
vous avez vu, les autres photos? ellse sont très belles, je trouve : http://www.keyboardmasher.com/oceanwithoutashore/images.html
Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.
Bill Viola
25 May 2007
Text © Bill Viola 2007
The work was inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:
ah oui, ça change complètement quand on les voit tous…