Grass is no longer green but pink. Trees, stones and the wide landscape, they all changed colours but what sounds like a fairytale wonderland, fails at second sight: armed soldiers in uniforms cross the landscape; people run through the streets; the atmosphere gets more and more disturbing. This is not surprising because the location and circumstances are anything but beautiful: Richard Mosse’s film „The Enclave“ ranges between documentary journalism and contemporary art as he captures life in Congo by using a discontinued military surveillance technology, a type of colour infrared film called Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for camouflage detection, this aerial reconnaissance film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.
Richard Mosse’s „The Enclave“ is the Irish contribution to the current 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and will be opened until November 24th 2013. As a major new multi-media installation, which was commissioned and curated by Anna O’Sullivan, Director of the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, the Irish artist collaborated with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost to create a highly immersive five-screen multimedia installation that is a mythic conflation of many discrete enclaves in Eastern Congo. Inserted as journalists within armed groups, which fight nomadically in a war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres and systematic sexual violence, the trio documented their environment by film, photography and sound. What could have been a two-fisted documentation turned into images that carry a fascinating and irritating atmosphere at the same time.
One reason for that is Mosse’s use of the Kodak Aerochrome film. Even though its origins can be found in military context and has found civilian uses among cartographers, agronomists, minerologists, and archaeologists to reveal subtle changes in the landscape, also Rock musicians like the Grateful Dead or Jimi Hendrix appropriated the medium in their artworks, making use of the psychedelic effect that follows the variation in colour. More than 50 years later, Richard Mosse utilises this paradox too: “Mosse uses this film to reveal a cancerous yet unseen humanitarian tragedy with a disturbing psychedelic palette, posing aesthetic questions in a situation of profound human suffering.”
The resulting imagery, shot on 16mm colour infrared film by Trevor Tweeten, renders the Sub-Saharan jungle war zone in sickly hues of crimson, purple, teal blue and hot pink. Entirely comprised of organic Congolese sound recordings, Ben Frost created an appending audio composition that adds to the visitor’s experience the sense of hearing. Altogether they push past the boundaries of adequate representation to create “a discomfiting and sinister world to penetrate sensibilities and make this ineffable nightmare visible.”
Richard Mosse: The Enclave, June 1st – November 24th 2013, La Biennale di Venezia, The Pavilion of Ireland.
Image 1: Still from ‘The Enclave’, shot on 16mm color infrared film in Eastern Congo, by Richard Mosse, 2012. A young soldier from Mai Mai Yakutumba poses in Savannah at a secret location near Lake Tanganyika, South Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012. Images 2+3: Richard Mosse, The Enclave, 2013. Six screen film installation, color infrared film transferred to HD video. Filmed in Eastern Congo. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo © Tom Powel Imaging inc.
A list of organizations the artist suggests for anyone looking to contribute to relief efforts in the Congo:
