Web / Auschwitz, No. 2, 2010 (excerpt)
Running time: 4:18 minutes / HD / black & white

Auschwitz, May 2010. Spiderwebs are illuminated by light in Auschwitz II, Birkenau, Sector Bla.

Camera: Sylvia Safdie
Editing: Patrick Andrew Boivin, Sylvia Safdie
Audio: Silent

On the 2nd day of my visit, I headed towards the barrack of the women’s latrines in the Auschwitz/Birkenau Sector B where my friend Marie Jeanne had taken me the previous day to show me where she filmed her series of photographs “Black Holes”. It had been raining non-stop for several days. As I looked into the latrines, I noticed cobwebs floating on the surface of the water. As I focused my camera the image seemed to transform. It was as if I was looking at the cosmos. The sequences that I filmed became the series of videos entitled Web/Auschwitz.

[…] Web focuses on the subtle rise and fall of a complex network of fine threads that remains ostensibly undisturbed, unknown particles knitted into its tangled fibers.”

– Scott McLeod, Press Release, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto, 2014.

This video was shown in the exhibition The Absent Present, Prefix, Toronto, in 2014.