La salle d’attente (2024)
12 mins. 2K video, Super8, found footage
In this fictional documentary, present-day Nation borders have collapsed into vast privatized housing complexes. Epitomizing advanced capitalism’s financialization and incarceration, the citizens of “Condo World” live in a so-called dream where it’s illegal and punishable to leave. The “real” outside is uninhabitable — likely due to ecological devastation — and curiously, unseeable. Both incarceration and holiday travel entail the same virtual escape into a world where nothing can be acted upon. On the occasion of such a virtual holiday, the narrator loses her sister — or, possibly, the sister loses herself.
Folding together loneliness and inaction, Pedersen implies a certain ineptitude of seeing, suggesting that “even in dreams, it is easier to describe what we saw than what we did.” A barrage of found TV clips, cell phone videos, and Super 8 footage conjugate temporalities, saying so much but perhaps still too little — as in, too little, too late.
-Dazibao
