Un jour, pendant une vente

It started with a question about a specific event. "Do you think we could translate its micro and macro choreography to a virtual/digital space?" But what event, we asked? "The one where a migrant was killed at an auction. Someone tested a gun on him".

A discussion on visualisation followed. We watched a work together that mapped the many sightings of a boat, attempting to cross the Mediterranean. The boat never arrived in Lampedusa.

We started to wonder how to make the event appear without relying on conventional aesthetics of legitimatization and reconstruction. Discomfort with the way another story could be told using the same tools, the same rigid map, the same military data [left-to-die]. The stability of the voice of the narrator was one way we understood that there was a reconstitution of a stable truth, different from those of the ones that had allowed the boat to sink, but in the same register of authority somehow.

We started searching for news coverage of the event that happened one day during a sales. Soon we realised there was only one sentence circulating, a single fragment describing the event: "Un jour, pendant une vente, un homme à côté de moi a été abattu d’une balle dans la tête. L’acheteur voulait tester un revolver qu’il voulait acheter." (One day, during a sale, a man next to me was shot in the head. The buyer wanted to test a revolver he wanted to buy).

The sentence circulated often in the company of a specific image, referring to another testimony related to people being sold. Several men sit together on a small surface. One of them has his face turned towards a camera, the upper part of his face is pixelated. [vendent]

We traced the appearance on-line of the sentence at the one hand, and the image on the other, and the places where they where put together. It seemed that they originated from different events. They were creating an event in each other's company.

What would it mean to re-construct the event from these fragments? Or the face of a person from the pixelated image?
De-militarization of visualisation, its aesthetic and tools (from bullet points to visualisation)
What would be a feminist interface to this event, different ways of representing?

Describing what you see, to understand differently what you are looking at. A close-caption exercise that would maybe act as an interface in itself.

Acts of re-enactment, reconstruction. Alignment, multiple, layers. Fiction, language and integrity. The trouble with embodiment.
Amanda Baggs - In My language

Pixels, papers. Projecting one standard system over another; reconstructing its construction, somehow.
time element. showing time, changes over time.

[left-to-die] http://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/left-die-boat/
[vendent] http://www.bouyafar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/maxresdefault.jpg


Un jour
pendant une vente
un homme 
à côté de moi
a été abattu
d’une balle
dans la tête.
L’acheteur
voulait tester
un revolver
qu’il voulait
acheter