Passage To Utopia 1: Stories From The Old Ruin

Irit Batsry’s hallucinatory soundtrack and disturbing images create an eerie and all too realistic narrative of destruction and ruin. This is a faked report of an imaginary investigation of an event that never happened. Batsry’s purposeful avoidance of documentary only serves to give her allusions to impending disaster more force. Batsry borrows her images largely from the commercial media; pictures of a sprinter, two Oriental women fending off the camera with their hands, a figure skater; all dissolve and are reconstructed electronically so that their ordinariness and lifeless stillness seem a cover for erotic passions and rapid motion.
Part 1 of Passage To Utopia: ‘An epic video work of the highest order, using state of the art technology and an original music score by composer Stuart Jones to create a work of majestic beauty on the nature of creation, identity and language. This poetic text is both a journey through personal and collective imaginary worlds and an inquiry into the limits of communication and art at the very edge of our imagination.’ – Michael Maziere