all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain

Protocinema presents an exhibition of work by Latifa Echakhch titled: All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. The exhibition includes two videos, one made in Istanbul, and a new floor work, in a forgotten building in the center of the Karaköy port neighborhood. This selection of works touches on temporality, loss of young people and hope, in this world that became a platform of departure for a war.

The exhibition title is one of the final spoken lines of the film Blade runner,1982, the American science fiction film adapted from the novel do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? 1968, by Philip K. Dick. In this last scene, Roy Batty, the last replicant, is about to die and during his system-shut-down process he begins to express himself. His sentences of poetry are both a naïve and beautiful way for a soldier/machine to think. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

yhe new video waiting for dolphins, 2015, was made by the side of the Bosphorus, at the approximate place where Echahkch saw a group dolphins sailing and jumping in the water during a previous visit. “It was such a beautiful moment, that I want to go back there, sit on the water’s edge and wait for these dolphins again. They may never come again, but I want to wait and to wish for this special moment.” the floor installation, inspired by Chinese calligraphers in public parks, is of a text written with a long-handled brush and water directly on the floor. It too, is temporary and dries in the sunlight. The text is in english painted daily, of poetry mixed with quotes of messages from different kinds of goodbye letters.

Echakhch’s second video is titled Jadid, Arabic for “new,”. “The name is taken from Al Jadid, a port city on the Moroccan shore where these images were taken. Local youngsters play at dive jumping from fortified walls, jumping one by one in succession for hours on end. Their jumps, several meters high, are risky, yet they brave the danger and perform them with blind innocence. As we watch them hurl themselves one by one into the void, we are overcome by mixed feelings of joy and fear boarding on euphoria. One would gladly join them if it hadn’t been for the caution and diminishing courage that comes with age.”