Script for Groundless Images, Video with sound,13: 25 minutes, 2018
“Script for Groundless Images” unpacks the affective registers upon which military and media complexes rely to propel and sustain a homogeneous narrative of trauma and war. Written and edited, mostly, with archival material from the Library of Congress Veterans Video History Project, “Script for Groundless Images” primarily focuses on the interviews gathered from the American veterans of the Persian Gulf War. The Veterans Video History Project of the United States’ Congress comprises of an ongoing collection of video-interviews contributed mostly either by veterans’ family members or various educational institutions. “Script for Groundless Images” looks at interview as a signature of media representation of war, which also utilizes images and personal archives as ‘memorabilias’ to facilitate the dominant narrative. These video-interviews are themselves archival residues while containing other forms of archival fragments such as photographs and various artifacts which interviewed veterans have collected during their involvement in the war. For this project, I worked with an actor and improvisor to create an auxiliary interview which takes these video-archives both as its method and content to fabricate a parallel story and embed it back within the larger body of these video archives. “Script for Groundless Images” divests from a cohesive storyline, which is one of the objectives of the Library of Congress history project; it reveals the uncertainty and performativity of interview as a tool for truthmaking and recollection.
Production of “Script for Groundless Images” was made possible at La Bande Vidéo residency. For further information on the project visit here.
+a full online version of the video is available on my Vimeo page, and is accessible in the above gallery.