Fossilization

The video ‘Fossilization’ was produced as part of the ‘Memory Lane’ project, commissioned in 2005 by the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The traditional idea of soundtracks as translation and extension of moving images was reversed for the occasion: five video makers were requested to produce a work based on a composition by David Shea. Each individual filmmaker could draw out his own trajectory throughout the various musical layers. D’Haeseleer merged sound with image into an immersive panorama of fossilised shapes and traces. Images were distorted, layered and shaped into an apocalyptic spectacle in which vaguely recognisable shades and objects seem to be sucked up, into a parallel, enamelled world. Underneath all of these hermetical levels ’Fossilization’ comes forward as a meditation on the slip-off of Western civilisation to a pandemonium of mass-tourism, -media and -consumption.