From an Abandoned Work

From an Abandoned Work is a visual journey through the uncertain matter of memory, a composition of orphaned images that cling to fragments of meaning without ever settling completely. The video takes its name from a work by Samuel Beckett — From an Abandoned Work (1957) — an unfinished and rambling text, built on an interrupted monologue, repetitions, deviations and moments of stalemate. Similarly, this audiovisual work embraces failure as a method, the unfinished as a form.

Made entirely from amateur found footage, the video is composed as an erratic visual collage, devoid of a narrative centre but dense with traces. The archival materials, coming from disparate and random sources, are never illustrative: they become relics, artefacts of unknown lives, visual survivors that speak more for what they hide than for what they show.

The artistic gesture here is not that of the demiurge editor, but rather that of the collector, the editor-poet, who moves among the fragments as among ruins, guided more by intuition than by logic. Fragmentarity is welcomed, even pursued: as in Beckett, progress is a continuous stumbling block, an obsessive and never conclusive return. Time, broken and discontinuous, becomes a psychic space, where every image is a ghost, every sound an echo.

The video does not tell a story, but evokes a state: that of interruption, repetition, doubt. It is a work that unfolds in the very act of abandonment, which embraces narrative failure as the original condition of thought and vision. Just as Beckett's text stops without ending, From an Abandoned Work does not seek closure, but opens up to the possible, the unsaid, the impossible to represent.

In an age in which every image is called upon to produce meaning, coherence and linearity, this work chooses the opposite: the unresolved, the unfinished, the abandoned. It is precisely in this radical choice that the video finds its poetic and political strength. Because, as Beckett wrote, 'to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.'