mode confusion, by peter burr
- #exhibitions
- #installations
Plague Vector is one episode in a longer film project that Portuguese artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha has been developing since 2015.
The video depicts a lone parachutist fallen from the stars, caught in the branches of an alien technicolor jungle. His radio, dislodged during the crash landing, alternates between hypnotic static sounds intermixed with a set of recordings of his voice describing a perilous landscape on the brink of collapse: an environment brought to its knees by the toxicity of the relationship between man and nature. The parachutist—suspended in the air, immobilized by the web of his man-made aeronautics contraption entangled in the wild environment—drifts between various states of reality and consciousness. Each time he begins to nod off, the radio pipes up with a new soliloquy describing the minute details of this poisonous landscape; and, each time, the parachutist responds with the same monosyllabic message: “echo…”