Naphtha Tears

A body (a girl’s, the earth’s) has disintegrated into images, been fragmented across the endless surfaces of audiovisual capitalism. Three avatars travel through copies of copies of landscapes, performing a ritual to heal the wound, to stem the flow of pixels and oil. In the associative logic of the dream, different realities bleed into one another: from the dark underbelly of contemporary popular culture, to ancient vegetation myths, to subterranean histories of fossil fuels. The montage combines disparate images, ranging from 3D animation reminiscent of early internet aesthetics, to images filmed in Hollywood’s periphery, or the pixelated, glitchy scraps and leftovers of late-capitalist audiovisual production, and weaves them into a poetic reflection on ecology and image culture, where ghostly paparazzi flashes, simulated myths, celebrity-saints, magic plants, and secret histories of coal and oil coagulate, contaminate each other.