Emptiness potencies: video between nihilism and transfiguration

Abstract

Since its early experiences in the 1960s, the video is characterized by flirting with the emptiness and silence, for offering us works in which the images appear as a draft or a mumbling, as something yet to come, works that resist interpretation, that seem to border on, sometimes, the complete nonsense. The purpose of this paper is to show that beyond pure negativity or a nihilistic naive gesture, there is in the art of video a radical proposal, an anti- hermeneutic poetic which proposes a new way of dealing with pictures and the world, of “being-in-the-world” - in a way that reason and the search for meaning find themselves replaced by a more embodied and sensory perception, in which being in the world means to feel much more the presence and materiality of things, rather than interpret them.