Occidental Totems

2011, HD video 16:9, color with sound, 15 minutes, on omnimount stands

Occidental Totems immerses the viewer into the life of a controversial artist: Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), mentor of Henry Moore, who will narrate the story of the statues he carved on the facade of the old Zimbabwe Embassy in London. The primitivist figures depicted a deviant humanity but got mutilated by the colonial power. In a fictional shift, Epstein who praised this exotic “other” seems to enter into a trance himself: the statues talk to him and give an account of a new radical reading of history.