Patrol

Patrol, video installation, 2003

Patrol, is a large-scale video installation that focuses on the idea of ‘knowing’ space through one’s body and eyes in the dark, using new visual elements.
Cnaani created a claustrophobic space covered by a low ceiling, built from semi-transparent material. The ceiling is covered with images projected from above (the video projectors are hung from the original ceiling, projecting onto the new lower ceiling). The images originally shot from underneath (under a milky glass floor), depict people walking and interacting at an upper level.
As she enters the room, the spectator feel trapped in a dark space: some activities happening above her had make her realize that the ‘normal’ realty is elsewhere, while she is trapped, looking from underneath at other people’s everyday life.
The images represent a street scene including the ordinary patterns of human steps, some everyday events, and small dramas: a couple fighting, someone dropping his wallet and collecting his money from the floor, a person falling on the street and getting hurt. The inability to communicate across the ceiling is emphasized by the viewer’s undivided attention and concentration on the behaviour of the people living above and their lack of response: the people in the image are totally oblivious to her existence.
The subject of this work is our all-too-familiar sense of observing realty without any real chance to change it. The work locates the spectator in a strange underworld and raises questions about the possibility of belonging and otherness.