BLACK BOX: THIS IS NOT MY FATHER

Black Box: this is not my father pays homage to the emotional power of video and film as a moving portrait, and yet at the same time considers the ultimate impotency and incompleteness of such visual surrogates to capture the essence of human life.

In 1990 my father and I travelled to the island of Culebra to document the
aftereffects of Hurricane Hugo. During this trip he made plans for a future trip to Venezuela. This decisive moment ultimately led to the plane crash that ended his life.

The video consists of 2 minutes of the only footage I have of my father and a
3-minute audio reenactment read from the transcript of the flight recorder
/black box that survived the crash. I shot the video of my father when we were
in Culebra. Edited in a continuous loop, the changing relationships between visuals and audio that occur with each repetition reflect on the shifting nature of perceived reality, the paradoxical links between chance and fate, and the perpetual cycle of life and death.

If you have a trouble viewing the video, you can also view it here.