wall
wall - 50 ANS D’ARTS VIDÉO- Instants Vidéo numériques et poétiques Marseille. Video installation -6`26" in loop.
By Kate Stanworth
On the wall of Wussmann Gallery, Argentine artist Fernando Lancellotti projects the shadow of a mouse scurrying in a spinning wheel on an infinite loop. Watching the creature’s futile effort to get somewhere elicits feelings of sympathy. Is this because his fate is so easy to identify with?
Lancellotti’s mouse has a mythical parallel in the Greek character Sisyphus, who is condemned for all eternity to push a rock up a hill, which then simply rolls straight back to the bottom. Writer Albert Camus drew parallels between Sisyphus’s senseless drudgery and a modern life spent working in factories and offices.
The oblivious mouse appears quite happy to accept its banal task however, and since Camus added that such a condition only becomes tragic when there is a consciousness of it, our feelings of sympathy are perhaps misplaced. What’s more, there is no cage that keeps him there, so we can only conclude that the little rodent has merrily accepted eternal imprisonment of his own accord.