day -1: Object Without Shadow

Through the vessel chimney, the smoke released from the combustion of fuel casts an invisible fire onto cargo container. The dust of coal that is too heavy to be carried away by the wind falls down and rests on the pure white body of the ship, casting a carbonate shadow onto things. The past casts onto the present while the present constantly take refuge to comfort itself in the territory of simulative future. From Farocki's observation in The Silver and The Cross, the slaves are always represented as small dark silhouettes without any defining characteristic or individuality. As if they are merely a collective chunk of coal, a living energy that can be unlimitedly harnessed to fire the engine of progress, a carbon elf that stays up at night to work for you when you are asleep. Modernity finds it necessary to shed light on matters, to create absolute visibility, to conquer their existence. And it is the very same light that enlightens the intellect that expels matters into shadow casted by the enlightenment. The cave. The history of colonialism lives in us the neo-humanoid liberal in form of shadow. Or, in fact, we are the shadow, the living carbon whose vitality is stolen by the doppelgänger of the gaze. Through the sorcery of abstraction we are captured in our own shadow that is cast further and further away from our body by the perverted angle of the disorientated sun. Our own double, the doppelgänger, pretends that it is us. It sleeps with our lovers, talks to our friends and feeds our babies, while we lay horizontally, following every act of cruelty it commits in the two dimensional world in which we are imprisoned. Try shouting, screaming, or crying, the shadow does not have mouth or eyes, it is merely a nameless silhouette that will always remain silent. In Chinese mythology, dead people die twice, first they become ghosts before they slowly weaken and die the second time. The multiplication of the sun performs the erasure of shadow, proving the final victory of capitalism over history. We, in this carbornated realm, the shadow with no home, the ash of time, we who create our own house in green that will melt down everything into viscous ruin.


*Photo by Rebecca Moss
**Video by Holly Schmidt