Obsidian 1, 2016

An abandoned coal silo encountered during a road trip through America formed the inspiration for 'Obsidian', a video installation by Agniet Snoep (1968, the Netherlands). Coal intrigues Snoep as tangible evidence of millions of years of life compressed in stone. Using the shiny black obsidian on the plinth in lieu of actual coal, Snoep set about mining this stone for its ‘memories’. One hundred and fifty compressed photographs of all three sides of the stone yielded razor sharp images onto which Snoep projected her conception of the stone’s inner life. The result: dreamlike sequences evoking feelings of loss, solitude, alienation and forsaken beauty, inspired by the final scene of John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ in which Eve, expelled from paradise declaims: “Elsewhere, everything seems desolate and inhospitable, unknown to us and unknown with us.”