Misty Man

A young man has been accused of theft. We see him behind barbed wire, falling in slow motion onto the grass. The artist Ansuya Blom alternates this powerful image and others that she shot in Suriname, such as a group of pelicans screeching around a fishing boat in Paramaribo, with 8 mm recordings of a first communion procession from her family archive.

Meanwhile we hear a woman’s voice reading from the 1982 book Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, a collection of letters from the French Bastille archives. Many of the letters are pleas to the court to lock up a spouse or child to prevent the entire family falling apart. We also hear the battle song of the White Horse Society of the Dakota people in the US.

In these ways, Misty Man offers food for thought about mental as well as physical confinement, while never making a clear-cut statement on the subject. The image of a young boy wearing a communion suit is significant in this context, with a digital zoom effect transforming his face into a pixelated, undulating surface—no matter how far we zoom in, we will never know the stirrings of his soul.