the lottery in Babylon

2017, 4 videos in loop, sound, monitors, variable dimensions.

Work made at the artistic residency 3bisF, CHP Montperrin.

The work takes it title from Jorge Luis Borges’ eponymous novel, in which the author describes a society where the games of chance are practiced so often and acutely that they confound with reality itself, as if all actual events were in fact the most perfect expression of chance. Four monitors rhythmically display a never-ending chess game. The images are extracted from a silent documentary film shot at the Montperrin psychiatric hospital in the 1950’s. These few seconds of film are stretched by means of mirroring, repetition and reversion procedures, while the added soundtrack intensifies the movement of the pieces on the chessboard. From time to time, the images of each monitor are randomly replaced by a sonnet of Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “Ajedrez”. In accordance with the laws of chance, the possibilities of reading the text entirely during a single visit are unlikely, but nevertheless exist.