Event.horizon.black.hole

Event.horizon.black.hole

Mladen Bizumic’s Event.horizon.black.hole is a video installation that projects images of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris back-to-back with footage of an avalanche on New Zealand’s Aoraki/Mount Cook, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The audio component of the work features sounds of flags flapping recorded at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, combined with ambient sounds recorded at Tongariro National Park. The Paris headquarters of UNESCO is made up of three buildings designed by architects Marcel Breuer (US), Pier Luigi Nevi (Italy) and Bernard Zehrfuss (France). Although the architecture caused controversy at the time of its inauguration in 1958, the complex has since become an outdated monument to Modernism; a fact emphasised by the buildings’ state of decay. Bizumic is aware of the irony of the situation; that a world organisation with a role as a global protector of cultural sites should have a crumbling Modernist monument as its headquarters. In contrast to the tremendous and sublime natural power of the avalanche, the footage of the snow-covered UNESCO headquarters affects a slow institutional decay.