Jenny Marketou
DE_LETE, 2006
single channel video 2 min 10 sec.

The source footage for DE_LETE was created entirely with a surveillance video camera which was stationed in my tent pitched along the “contested” border line between Tijuana and San Diego, US in the backdrop of the small fishing village Las Playas at the Gulf of Mexico . To our surprise as we watch DE_LETE the border materializes itself only in performing the everyday intimacy and human communication between men and women who come from both sides of the border to make the wire fence their meeting point without ever trying crossing it. As the human performance of “everydayness” enfolds and repeats itself in slow motion and in monochromatic blue “the border” vanishes in the moment of its existence and suddenly becomes an ambivalent place at the fringe of two cultures , a new social space with new relationships, hardly ever noticed , remote and yet controlled by invisible powers .The sound is the ambient outdoor noise which was recorded by the camera.

Jenny Marketou
War Prayer, 2007
single channel video projection
with sound 2 min 17 sec.

The title of the video “War Prayer” references a well-known text by Mark Twain. Twain’s “The War Prayer”, was a parody of the deceptive use of faith to trick the non-believer. This very notion, after the 9/11 events, has been used by the media to convey threat and violence. My video, which is based on the re-enactment of the act of prayer, brings to mind a line from Dostoevsky’s novel, “Notes in the Underground” being “I am God’s lonely man”. However, the irony is that the women’s prayer in the video is diffused and violated by the invasion of a domestic housefly, which hovers all over her body. The video invites the viewers to ask themselves where exactly does true evil lie and what or whom is exactly threatening our existence today. My intention with “War Prayer” is to convey a feeling of alienation and loneliness as consequence to being unique or different in a world of indifference, lack of communication and fear for the other, to which we do not understand.

Jenny Marketou
Don’t Forget to Pack your Peace of Mind, 2007
single channel with sound 2 min

The title of the video references a TV add which plays on travelers’ and consumers’ insecurities and fears, persuading them to spend more money as their safest weapon against “terror”. The content of this video was created entirely from the re-mastering of video footage, which I took during a number of visits starting in 1995, to the old city of Jerusalem and the desert Negev in Israel. The fluidity of the narrative and my visual relationship to the physical landscape manifests itself in the montage of imagery and through the visual effects, which are rather colorful and painterly. The video images are almost abstracted to the point that we forget history and cultural memory, which remains dormant in our subconscious, and we become totally emerged in the utopian scenery that passes through our eyes very fast. It is our personal voyage of displacement.