INCOGNITO ERGO NON SUM (2020)


This film was produced specifically for an online context. It takes as its starting point a typical artist interview. While a pseudo “new classical” soundtrack drives the rhythm of the interview, the dialogue devolves into a theater of absurdity, confounding the characters’ notions of their own public, professional, and private lives as they explain strategies of personal image management.
The film is filled with half-truths drawn from personal experiences and encounters – the paragraph above was adapted from part of the script, itself adapted from a prior text – though they are scattered amongst falsehoods and exaggerations.
A key reference for the film was Thomas Nagel’s 1998 essay “Concealment and Exposure”, in which he argues for the protection of private space and laments moral outrage generated by private choices; perhaps it serves as a template (a warning?) for how to assess these characters as their flaws and virtues are exposed through a barrage of close-up images and film clips. The multi-media-based construction of their personas also reflects the tension of how representation and reality can both align and diverge. Produced alongside the video "Incognito Ergo Non Sum" is a series of photographs, as seen in the film, depicting the amateur actors in the process of reading their scripts. (Maybe, then, they weren’t produced alongside the film but for the film, or even inside the film?)