Javier Lloret Annotation

"Ocean without a shore", a video/sound 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 three monitors positioned on the altars of the church of San Gallo, a small church in Venice built on the sixteenth century. These altars 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 especially 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 videos 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 shoot the people before they cross the life threshold and state of the art colour HD cameras for shooting when they cross it, 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.

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.