Postcards from the Desert Island
2010-2011
Video, 00:22:23.
Materials: SD video transferred to DVD, painted backdrop
Collection: Courtesy of Galleria Laveronica, Modica.
Postcards from the Desert Island documents a three-week workshop conducted with children attending the École Vitruve in Paris, a parent-run experimental public elementary school. In reference to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies the children were invited to collectively build and organise a society on a fictional desert island in their school assembly hall. They quickly run into political difficulties, such as the structures of decision-making or the role and rule of law. The film shows ‘a world in a nutshell’ where the children’s discussions and experiments of self-governance echo the impasses of Western democracies and the struggle for power inside such systems.
