The Video Diaries documents the artist’s personal moments that he lived during the Egyptian revolution in January and February of 2011. The three-split screen of a synchronized identical timeline intertwines video footage that the artist captured, stock footage from broadcast media agencies, TV material, social media clips, and portraits of acquaintances. The footage of collective doing, revolting, and repression is assembled to create several parallel narratives that combine media-propagated imagery and direct first hand experience. The original music score created for the work adds intimacy and nostalgia as a tribute to political figures and personal acquaintances who died during the riots.

The Video Diaries portrays narrative structures of social turmoil through evidence from collective, mediatic, and personal memory. It incorporates video footage and still images from news feeds and online material as a hybrid form of primary documents shared on worldwide networks. The visuals created from real-time-real-life footage assembled on a synchronized timeline presents the attempt to reconstruct intimacy from the depersonalization of social upheaval and its media representation.

Read The Magma of Reality By Nicola Trezzi.