Javier Lloret Annotation

"Ocean without a shore", by Bill Viola

Ocean without a shore it was an art commission that the video artist Bill Viola did for the Venice Biennale in 2007. The piece consists in three video projections on the altars of the church of San Gallo, a small church in Venice built on the sixteenth century. The altars of the church were the starting point of Viola’s search for the idea in which his interests as an artist meet this religious context. Viola found out that "in the origins of Christianity these altars are 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”.

For executing this idea Viola used a specially designed for the project thin wall of water as a threshold that separates the world of the dead with the world of the living ones. In his videos you can see a series of people getting closer, one by one. Viola used really old black and white analog security surveillance cameras to shoot the people before they cross the life threshold and state of the art colour HD cameras for shooting when they come 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 the image from both cameras blend in a non linear and beautiful image transition. The thin water’s curtain symbolizes the fragility of life, the borderline between life and death.

Bill Viola mentions in the website of the project that this work was also inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop.