BROKEN SPECTRE | RICHARD MOSSE

With the seventy-four minutes of Broken Spectre (2022), Richard Mosse achieves the ambitious summa, both ethical and aesthetical, of a practical and conceptual investigation into images.
The subject of this intricate documentary film is the process of massive deforestation in the Amazon, rendered using highly sophisticated filming technologies such as the Geographic Information System or multispectral cameras used in satellite systems, which provide footage alternating between aerial views and specific actions of environmental devastation and mutilation of the ecosystem. The saturated, unnatural color tones of purple and pink, which already identify Mosse’s photographic work thanks to the use of infrared films, alternate with sharp, essential, and violent black and white sequences, reminiscent of the most classical conventions of photojournalism.

How can we ‘see’ climate change? A provocative but not idle question; human perception, primarily through the eye, only offers us a partial rendition. The use of scientific imaging technologies is therefore not an end in itself, not just an exercise, but essential to the goal of challenging the homogenization of representation (having seen one image of a fire in the Amazon, having seen them all) and revealing what is still unseen. The unseen is both practical and ideological; whether it is unseen because it is censored or impossible for the human eye to see, those are two profoundly different reasons for blindness that tend toward the same overcoming through activism: knowledge and awareness.

Pursuing a militant and field investigation approach, Mosse openly declares his intention to simultaneously seek active viewer engagement, inviting them to navigate their own path within the film, without imposing or limiting perception to the artist/author’s vision.
This is quite a challenging operation considering the impressive installation, which includes 4 huge projections for 4 video channels in 4K and 20 speakers. The sensation is more akin to embarking on a space-time journey that moves between a pseudo-fairytale dimension, highly disturbing, and a sudden return to reality: the sound, entrusted to Ben Frost, follows, accompanies, and precisely and punctually amplifies the images, amidst sequence’s articulated and provoked continuity and discontinuity.

Broken Spectre is included in the exhibition VERTIGO, curated by Urs Stahel, set up at MAST, Bologna, until June 30, 2024.

Richard Mosse
Broken Spectre, 2022
Film still
© Richard Mosse. Broken Spectre was co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support was provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery. Director/Producer: Richard Mosse, Cinematographer/Editor: Trevor Tweeten, Composer/Sound Design: Ben Frost.

01/05/24