Liminal Presence

The moving image of hands leafing through a burned book was made in response to imagining picking up and trying to ‘read’ one of the burned and fragilised books, that would have been found in the streets after the bombings in Al-Mutanabbi Street*, which is the cultural quarter of booksellers and cafes in Baghdad. Transporting this through projection onto the wall of a cave in the Brecon Beacon mountains, Plato’s ‘The Allegory of the Cave’ comes to mind, and the idea of shadows of images, as well as the elusive nature of knowledge. The burned fragmented pages of printed text blend into the near archaeological primordial of scratches and incisions that cover the walls, and which are invisible to the naked eye in the depths of this seemingly timeless underworld.