Javier Lloret Annotation

"Ocean without a shore", a video installation by Bill Viola

Ocean without a shore it was an art commission that the video artist Bill Viola did for the 2007 Venice Biennale. The piece consists of six loudspeakers and three large plasma screens positioned on the altars of the church of San Gallo, a small church in Venice built on the sixteenth century. Viola found out that "in the origins of Christianity these altars were a place where the dead connects with the living ones" and used that fact as one of his sources of inspiration for coming up with the idea of this piece: “the notion of the dead coming temporarily back to our world”. Viola mentions in his website that this work was also inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop and the name of the installation was taken from these lines from andalusian sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn al’Arabi (1165-1240): "The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no beginning or end, in this world and the next.”

For executing this idea Viola used a specifically designed for the project thin wall of water as a threshold that separates the world of the dead ones with the world of the living ones. In the screens you can see a series of people walking slowly towards you, one by one. Viola used really old black and white analog security surveillance cameras for showing us the people before they cross the life threshold and state of the art colour HD cameras for showing us when they cross the threshold, coming back to life. The use of those black and white old surveillance cameras provided to the people a ghost appearance. The thin water’s curtain is where, thanks to a special mirror prism system, the image from both cameras blend smoothly. It symbolizes the fragility of life, the borderline between life and death.