Enargeia (or bright unbearable reality) was the phrase that the ancients used to describe the aura of the classical work of war – the Iliad. It refers to the Iliad’s vocative power, to when the gods came down to earth from heaven, as they were, in their truest expression in beauty or in terror. The research and artistic project explore how humans and other living beings are affected and interconnected in the experience of sudden grief and is situated within the existing discourses of grief, politics and multi-species thinking within the contemporary arts. It unravels the known and existing discourse / histories of image making to excavate and propose alternative frames rooted in the poetics and politics of the present condition.
Working with the tools of chemical analogue photography and the notion of the ‘live’ encounter in contemporary art practice, the work uses early cinematic techniques, photographic process, sculptural assemblages, and sonic propositions to propose ‘live’ encounters that are activated by others both individually and collectively. The project questions the presence of the dead in the life of the living and open how grief resides within, around and through images.