Procession was filmed two years ago, while walking home one evening during a residency in Apulia. Although common in Italy, in person a religious procession felt thought-provoking and unexpected. I was challenged by the high energy of this action, the normalcy with which it was perceived by locals, and the conviction with which it was performed by the inhabitants of the town. It got me thinking, parallel to trying to make sense of the crises of the world, about how we perceive historical events and our roles in them, how they feel in daily life, the forms they’re communicated through, and their relationship to truth. Upon my return, I began structuring the footage; meanwhile, the U.S. presidential election media narratives U-turned—from a story of seemingly inevitable conviction to a handoff of seemingly unlimited power. The quick turnaround of communication strategies, with European governments drafting new frameworks around transactional foreign policy within days, created a sense of cognitive dissonance similar to the one I experienced while observing the procession. I thought to myself: Is this real? As human beings, we are firstly affected by form, light, rhythm, and energy; unspoken social dynamics seep into our subconscious as messages and inform our judgment, before we become conscious of it. It makes one tired to always be on the lookout for untruths presented as truth.
I made around forty versions of this film, working through different conceptual, aesthetic, and sound approaches, until I arrived at the final one. This process was about adding and removing until nothing more required change. What I found interesting in the procession footage was the symbolism of time embedded in it. The figure of Maria SS. Addolorata, the central figure of the procession, is a type of devotion to the Virgin Mary, often depicted with droplets of tears running down her face or with seven swords representing seven sorrows piercing her heart. In the history of our understanding of time, the idea of linearity brought by Christianity—a progression from suffering toward transcendence, as embodied by this figure—for the first time introduced a narrative model for linear progress, replacing previous cyclical concepts of time. This narrative of progression, now embedded in political and cultural imaginaries, suggests an advancement through form while often ideologically returning to the point of departure. The final part of the film appeared to me in an active imagination session, in which I was walking through a long tunnel that began at a Kunsthaus, and at the end of it found a cave with a projection of footage from a car drive. I placed this footage into the sequence the next day, and to my surprise, the film was complete. This car drive returns to the same point where the procession takes place—the rotunda the procession passes at the time of filming. Yet the car doesn’t stop; it passes it and continues on to something else—a distorted reality gives way to a meditation on timelessness.
June 5, 2026, Berlin