2025 Dual-Screen Visuals
4K Colour /Sound/3 minutes
The work was filmed in the Western Sahara—a territory under former Spanish colonial rule that remains suspended in an ongoing geopolitical vacuum. For a fee of one dollar per person, the artist secured permission to record local leather artisans. The camera documents the grueling, visceral choreography of leather processing: flaying, soaking, kneading, stamping, and sun-crying, directly converting manual survival into a performative spectacle purchased by the lens.
As the "second skin" of the animal body, leather exposes the raw violence of nature disciplined and formatted by human intervention. The scraping of raw hide, the penetration of chemical dyes, and the desiccating desert heat are not benign artisanal traditions; they constitute a brutal taxonomic order. Living organisms are flayed, categorized, and commodified, aggressively disciplined to enter the circuits of global exchange.
Rather than assuming the posture of neutral ethnography, the moving image functions here as a self-indicting apparatus of visual extraction. Framed by the lens and exposed to the gallery gaze, the artisans' sweat-soaked labor is formatted into an exoticized, consumable "cultural scene." Through this optic transaction, a double exploitation occurs: manual labor is bought out for a nominal dollar, while embodied energy is harvested as raw material for the production of aesthetic meaning.
The work exposes the cinematic apparatus as an accomplice to contemporary global capitalism. By transmuting peripheral physical exhaustion into refined moving images, the film reveals how cultural documentation operates as an ongoing machinery of symbolic colonization—stripping marginalized bodies of their territorial and visual sovereignty.