Marcin Dudek
2017
4K, 16:9, color, 9 min.
no sound
video collage, loop
This video places individuals appearing in Dudek’s research back into the center of the spectacle. It is a digital work made through analogue collaging, bridging mediated experience with autographical detail and connecting dots as it jumps to different people and points of history. What are the links between Margaret Thatcher, Boban, Gustave LeBon and Marcin Dudek or his father for that matter? How do individuals shape mass experiences like those in ancient Pompei, the French Third Republic or an EC qualifier in 1995? They are the leaders, the police, the players, the fans, the analysts, activists, industrialists and so on that construct conditions and create the architecture of an event. Dudek uses football matches to confirm how politically charged an event always is and how in the marking (and making) of an event, individuals get lost in the crowd. They are not represented, but later presented like actors in a play or players on a pitch, sacrificed towards the political truth of the historic transgression. While Dudek begins by thinking about the role of his father, his friends and himself in all this, what he brings forward has a relevancy that stretches beyond the stadium. Today it isn’t just the physical being together that creates a crowd; ideas and issues are used to build consensus of opinion, which gives the crowd agency before it slips into action.