COLUMBA RIOT, 2012

HD-Video, 3'53"

While using a poetic-aesthetic approach and roam visually through places far from the eye, Eyal Segal invades a deserted silo in the Arava dessert. In Columba Riot the camera penetrates into an abandoned concrete structure populated by pigeons. A mysterious, even intimidating, atmosphere develops: footsteps on layer of droppings, feathers scatter through the air, birds flutter in front of a barred window, and a blurred figure passes through all these. There is no plot, although old ones spring to the viewer's mind (like Hitchcock's movie 'The Birds'), creating a surreal combination of seduction and horror, the symbolic and the concrete.

The setting is an agricultural-industrial enterprise - a feed-silo in an industrial zone in the Arava that was abandoned before it started operating. Nature took over the empty silo, and pigeons converted it into a present-day columbarium. Free and independent, the birds hover around the intruder who has infiltrated their living-space. [Dalia Manor]