Bystander
Found images, text.
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“Between the years 2005 and 2010, the author of this text spent a considerable portion of his youth paying the occasional visit to a number of dance competitions, organized in all major cities of Belgium and The Netherlands. These dance competitions, staged to emulate street fights and other forms of physical conflict, were never participated in by the author himself, who chose to remain in the position of a passive observer throughout all of these events.
Years later, between 2020 and 2022, the author found himself giving into a nostalgic desire to revisit these dance competitions; Repeatedly digging parts of them up on YouTube, where they had been uploaded in the form of video recordings by fellow observers. Because he remembered where he stood or sat during most of the battles, the author turned it into a personal exercise to locate his own, passively observing figure in every video—which he then screen captured and cropped so that only his figure remained.
Ultimately, a selection of these screen-captures was printed out and joined by a printed version of this text, in a fruitless attempt to objectively document and make tangible the author’s intentions.”
