Skin on skin

HD, Stereo Sound, 3’ 18”
Credits
Text quoted from Quintilian 11.3, edited and translated by Donald A. Russel (2001).
Images sourced from Instagram #fingerphotobombing and from the artist. Audio the artist.

The film ‘Skin on Skin’ positions the contemporary hand as ‘divorced from thought and the body’ through revealing ‘amputations’ and empty gestures found through Instagram images where fingers have been accidentally caught in the camera’s image. This is juxtaposed with a narration from Quintilian’s guide to the Ancient Roman use of the hand as a demonstrator of thought. Through this juxtaposition the film seeks to suggest that the proverb ‘without one’s hands one cannot think’ has now become true – where amputated fingers are received by other senseless fingers, re-scrolled, communicating nothing other then their own non-sense.