A Free Moment

2011, 35mm film converted to HDCam SR video. Silent. 4 min.

A Free Moment explores the remains of Tell el-Ful, a building in northeast Jerusalem intended to serve as a summer palace for the Jordanian royal family. Begun in 1966, the building’s construction was halted by the Six-Day War the following year. The building was never completed nor was its early structure removed, and the site is Israeli territory. Evron examined this modern ruin by placing a 35mm cinema camera on a robotic arm attached to a track, and programming the apparatus to complete three simultaneous actions: dolly (the camera moves in a straight line on a track), pan (the camera moves in a 360-degree horizontal revolution), and tilt (the camera moves in a 360-degree vertical revolution). While each individual type of camera motion is common practice, the layering of all three at once is unusual, and produces remarkably unfamiliar results. This piece is ideally shown as a large-scale projection, to maximize the unstable sensations created in viewers’ bodies by the complex movement of the camera. The four-minute running time of the piece corresponds with the length of a single film reel. Like Oriental Arch, A Free Moment is in keeping with Evron’s explorations of how architecture can serve “as conductor of historical memory and a signifier of the possibility of a future, a possibility which is often revealed as a failure.”  (LR)

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