Four Thousand Blocks
Artist:
Ellie Ga
Date:
2014
Medium:
Video installation with 3 projections
Materials:
Son
Collection:
Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
In the video triptych Four Thousand Blocks, Ellie Ga examines the transmission of memory and history. This narrative work imbued with a mythological dimension unfolds around a central video of the exploration of the waters of the Lighthouse of Alexandria—one of the seven wonders of the world. It recreates the artist’s experience of diving among these archaeological remains of Egyptian civilization, monuments of a collective memory and a universal foundation of culture. The other two videos act as metadiscourses, illustrating the process of creating a typography. In the background is a reference to Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, and by extension of writing—a condition for the perpetuation and dissemination of knowledge, a tool of memory and history. In Four Thousand Blocks, Ellie Ga questions this function of writing. Shouldn't forgetting be considered a value? And furthermore, don’t the words we use to preserve the facts paradoxically lead to the erasure of the lived experience from our memory?