FEVER ARCHIVE

An automated system continuously accesses media fragments. It returns, again and again, to the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia—not to recount it, but to inhabit its unresolved spaces focusing more on the broader social political themes surrounding this event than the actual consequence. The result is a collapse of memory into noise. What remains is not a narrative—but residue: endless, partial, and deferred, too fragmented and too quickly transmitted to fully comprehend. The work's intentional framing restricts perception. Through the use of constricted spaces as a vehicle for the transmission of the work, Fever Archive requires the audience to physically conform to activate the work—obliging them to engage on the artist's terms. The work returns to a mode of controlled spectatorship made familiar by Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece Étant Donnés where viewing is possible only through a tightly choreographed point of view. Fever Archive translates that restricted, keyhole-like logic of looking into a contemporary, networked context, replacing the body in Duchamp's work with a body of data. FEVER ARCHIVE was commissioned as part of BLOW-UP by City of Art and is currently exhibited at Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta Malta alongside works and artefacts by or featuring, Helmut Newton, Christian Dior, Andrew Grima, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Joana Biarnés, David Hockney and Sylvia Plath. Photo: Rebecca Zammit