A three-way conversation between the artist, a candle and a lightbulb on a dimmer, in a personal attempt to go back in time through interactions of light. At times, electrical light weighs upon our eyes with its tyrannical demand for attention. But when the power is out, we experience a freedom that lets us return to simpler and gentler ways of illumination. This return, though nurturing and devoid of excess, is only temporary. We are eventually forced to accept the irreversibility of technological complexity we have created.

Distributed by Groupe Intervention Video (GIV)

Experimental/Ritual/Performance    
No dialogue/sans dialogue  
Duration 5:22 

FESTIVALS / PRESS

2023 Festival OODAAQ, L’Oeil d’OODAAQ, Rennes, France
2022 Antimatter Media Arts Festival, at Ministry of Casual Living, Victoria, Canada
2022 XXVe Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Capacité (presque) illimitée, Toulouse, France
2022 PRESS : Rencontres digital catalogue: XXVe Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Capacité (presque) illimitée: Installations (p. 273)
2021 PRESS: Vie des Arts: Le festival HTMlles : laisser le temps faire son œuvre
2020 HTMlles Festival, Ecological Disturbances: Slowing Down, Reflecting and Re-imagining – Présenté par le Groupe Intervention Vidéo & Ada X, Montreal

Earlier version – Exhibitions :

2014
Occam’s Razor: Art, Science & Aesthetics, at !dea Gallery (Ontario Science Centre), Toronto
Occam’s Razor: Art, Science & Aesthetics, at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto

In Hello Earth (2020) by filmmaker Vjosana Shkurti, the brightness of a light bulb is altered by substances that partially block its surface: first paint, which makes it opaque, then wax from a candle that melts and drips onto its globe with the incandescent heat.

The light bulb is reminiscent of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installation Pulse Room (2006), exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014, in which three hundred light bulbs flickered to the rhythm of the heartbeats of people who had recorded their heart rates. In contrast to Lozano-Hemmer’s spectacular work, Shkurti favors the ordinary, slow variations, and the agency of matter, which is at the heart of Troubling Ecologies (2019) by designers and architects Sierra Druley and Jean Ni, where islands of plastic make up the topography of a future world. The hegemony of plastic stems from capitalist seduction and the growing consumption of resources to satisfy our ever-increasing desires.

The robotic narration reminds us of the vulnerability and porosity of our bodies, as well as the irreversible impacts of oil dependency on the environment, bodies, and other living organisms. The question, then, is to reflect on being rather than having, as suggested by lamathilde’s avoir et être (2020), and thus to rethink the relationship between living beings, economics, nature, and politics in terms of solidarity in order to escape the drift that threatens us.

(translated from French)

– CAMILLE BÉDARD
Vie des Arts: Le festival HTMlles : laisser le temps faire son œuvre

Hello Earth, such a greeting would imply an external speaker who, seeing it in its entirety, would seek contact with it in a spirit of sympathy. However, such a greeting is never uttered vocally, as the ambient music connotes this otherworldly, extraterrestrial space with its topical sci-fi sounds. Conversely, the soon-to-be-recognizable object, a lamp, brings us back to our human concerns. The Earth being greeted turns out to be an incandescent light bulb whose roundness could be misleading if its neck did not reveal its domestic use as a “light maker.” Explored, it gives off light thanks to the filaments to which the opening shot reduces it, accompanied by a sound connoting inter-spatial travel. A strange process distances itself from this fictional future, associating this light source with a dimmer switch and an old-fashioned candle, for a ceremony in which only a hand holding a brush enters the frame.

The bulb alternately dazzles, illuminates, even assaults the eye, or fades and goes out, depending on how long the dimmer switch or electronic switch cuts off the power, giving the eyes a rest and softening the lighting and the atmosphere. Then the flickering flame of the candle creates a calm atmosphere, already sacrificed because the residual heat from the lamp melts the candle, which becomes fluid enough for the brush to spread it over the glass in several layers until it darkens, until the heat from the bulb melts this layer again.

Metaphorically, concerns about the consequences of the Anthropocene… of what human beings are doing to their planet, become clearer. Light – heat – melting – darkening – heat – melting. In our attempt to return to light through the candle, our technology jeopardizes it, even though without it, its simple use leads to its destruction. The human hand triggering the degradator and wielding the brush with the best will in the world.

It could be a fable of the light bulb and the candle that is lost in its desire to extinguish electric light, the moral of which would remind humans that it is time to regulate their relationship with energy.

(translated from French)

– SIMONE DOMPEYRE
XXVe Rencontres Internationales Traverse Catalogue, (p. 273)