Miceli utilizes formal experimentation, investigative travel, and archival research to chart the visual, physical, and cultural manifestations of trauma inflicted on social and natural landscapes. Often taking shape as photographs, videos, and installations, her projects explore not only their de... Read more
Miceli utilizes formal experimentation, investigative travel, and archival research to chart the visual, physical, and cultural manifestations of trauma inflicted on social and natural landscapes. Often taking shape as photographs, videos, and installations, her projects explore not only their depicted subjects, but the history and continuing use of the media with which they have been represented. They make use of organizational systems that are at once intuitively conceived and rigorously designed. 88 from 14,000 is a video work based on a group of photographic portraits taken of prisoners eventually assassinated by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous S21 Security Prison in Phnom Penh. Miceli chose to work with portraits of the 88 prisoners whose records included the dates of both their incarceration and their assassination. Using this information, she developed a system that would allow her to quite literally bring these images back to fleeting life: a screen of falling sand was used as a projection surface for each image; the amount of sand dropped, and thus the amount of time the projected image could exist in space, was dependent upon the amount of time each prisoner spent at S21. One kilogram of sand (equivalent to four seconds of projection time) was dropped for each day that the respective image’s subject survived in the prison. Thus the survival of the image itself is linked to the survival of a human being. Miceli recorded digital video footage of each of these projections, so that the final work is a sequence of hauntingly realized digital ‘movies’ that represent the confluence of sculptural, performative and photographic strategies. However, the work is not merely a technical feat, but rather an intensely moving attempt to retrieve some measure of physical immediacy for the murdered subjects depicted throughout its duration. No longer are these merely images––88 from 14,000 is in fact the documentation of a calibrated interaction between portraits, light, material, and time, one that conjures the perverse intimacy that always exists between the photographer and the photographed.
