Dedicated follower

About this video

I've made this video especially for the theme exhibition Rituals (Rituelen), which will take place in the autumn of 2022 at the Rietveldpaviljoen, Amersfoort. It will be a centrepiece of a larger installation.

Many human customs are encapsulated with rituals. I took a close and critical look at the rituals concerning the phenomenon of "following ". As an artist I am interested in decomposing social phenomenons, strip it from its general social acceptance and examine it on it's true merits.

The difference between following and following

I feel more or less obliged to clarify what I mean by following within this context, because we more or less all follow and imitate, constantly, consciously, unconsciously and since the dawn of time.

Our community is what she is today because of endless replication and continuation. The public was always eager to embrace new heroes.

I make the distinction between critical following and blind following. The following I am referring to in my video is blind and fanatic. In the blind variety the critical ability kind of disappears and dedication and fanaticism gradually increases. A fanatical follower more or less surrenders his uniqueness and literally hands over his individuality and power. What consequences this may have thereafter depends entirely on the followed, to whom this authority is granted to. Passionate following sounds fairly harmless, but is it really?

To follow, anno now, anno the past, anno the future.

Following, anno now, is something that literally engages masses of people on all kinds of different levels. Because it has an enormous social, commercial and economic impact, it raises the question to what extent we are slowly losing our autonomy en masse and what possible consequences are still in store for us. How will we look back on this in the future or is the future a more extreme continuation of what we are experiencing today?

I tried to make this insightful in an artistic way. I have created a compilation of video, sound and music fragments in which I have swept all types of dedicated followers together. My focus is on the follower not the followed. By means of some famous historical images from, the 2nd World War, the Cultural Revolution, some snippets from videos of influencers, fans of pop idols and some fragments from famous movies such as 1984, I would like to take you with me and show how closely related the rites concerning "fanatical" following are. A familiarity with the films, whose images and quotes I used, certainly helps in understanding my message. Irony and brutal reality, fiction and non-fiction alternate. Image and sound tell a conflicting story.

read more@ https://www.maritotto.nl/dedicated-follower-eng/