Ella Littwitz
Ontology of the Void, 2024
Single channel HD video, color, sound
7 minutes, 8 seconds
Edition of 5
Copyright The Artist & Harlan Levey Projects
Ontology of the Void, ponders the way millennia-long terrestrial processes are echoed in politics, addressing a geological timescale as a means to think about the intractable conflicts of the present....
Ontology of the Void, ponders the way millennia-long terrestrial processes are echoed in politics, addressing a geological timescale as a means to think about the intractable conflicts of the present. This metaphor is narrated as the viewer watches accumulating piles of potash, a material that has been extracted from the waters of the Dead Sea, while an ROV deposits an ingot of magnesium in the sea-bed. This metal ingot withdrawn from that same location, in being returned to the original source will soon dissolve again. Underlying this extractive frenzy, the Dead Sea itself is rapidly disappearing. The name of this terminal lake, which was once a metaphor for the impossibility of life to exist in such salinity, is rapidly becoming prophetic. The image of the artist rappelling down an 80-meter deep chimney-like cave in Mount Sodom was filmed with a 360-degree video camera, which gives the impression that she is floating in a time-and-space warp. As she descends, the narrator tells the tale (and possible geological future) of the biblical mountain of Sodom, “a symbol of society that sinned and was destined for destruction.”