Mabel Palacín. ‘Homeland’

Homeland is a film that is born entirely from a photograph. Using a thousand fragments of a photograph that has disappeared and cannot be pictured in the mind, two characters who simply appear as voices attempt to reconstruct it and find the reason for its disappearance. Both of them view the images differently, and a film documents the reconstruction process. The partnership that eventually forms between them guides us through the remains of a culture in which art appears as a potential means of salvation. 

André Malraux offers a definition of art history as the history of what is photographable. Museums already possessed the ability to transform objects, but the advent of photography essentially established art history as a discipline. Reproduction changes the relationship we hold with art, and by expanding the scope further, some minor arts are transformed into rivals of their major counterparts. The museum serves as a space for the metamorphosis of perspective. Homeland is a piece comprised of 1,000 photographs, fragments of a lost photograph, and a video – a fluid form where the process becomes a decisive element. At the same time, the composition forges a link with the museum structure and its potential to persist within the interplay of image and architecture.

Homeland sets in motion a process in which an image is fragmented into a thousand pieces and subsequently reassembled as a film that aims to restore the lost connection between each individual part. The persistent fragmentation tests the boundaries of the image. The original disappears into the thousand fragments that scatter across the room and reappear in the form of a film projected in a separate area. All the images create a mechanism in which process and narrative intertwine. 

Homeland is a work that examines the diverse aspects of a photograph; by combining process, mechanism, and narrative, it establishes a dialogue with Gothic altarpiece painting as a narrative artifact that can be viewed through a contemporary image.