David Claerbout in conversation with Sara Dolfi Agostini
this conversation was held online between David Claerbout and Blitz curator Sara Dolfi Agostini on 29 April 2021.
David Claerbout participated in The Eye of The Storm - Blitz’s first online exhibition, part of the new online initiative OPEN - with Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013). In this artwork, Claerbout deployed 3D and new media technology in order to turn a photographic instant into endless repetition and confront visual perceptions, yearning for change and hope. As the act of waiting unfolds into an existential, cyclical condition rather than a one-time event, the artwork becomes the perspective from which to examine productivity and capitalism in relation to the workers and ourselves, even more now that the Covid-19 pandemic has altered our sense of the passage of time.