Name: a familiar face / facing the truth
Duration: 30min
Equipment needed: Projector and wall
Space: Outside on a building wall with a light colour

Looking into
a familiar face
are we facing the truth?

We spend our whole life surrounded by cameras. Everyone has one in their pocket, capturing everything from the utterly trivial to life-deciding moments. But what does our relationship with cameras mean? What does the camera show of a person? What does it conceal?
The camera acts both as a shield, a barrier between ourselves
and the person we wish to be portrayed as,
and as a litmus test, that displays us (sometimes painfully) as we are.

We take something very simple: asking the people we know to
look into a camera for two minutes.
It turns out to be not simple at all.
It feels strange, strange as in unfamiliar and foreign.
There is a difference in how a person reacts when being filmed
and their reality, their everyday life.
It feels uncanny – unheimlich (unhomely in German).

How many people can a person know?
People you know well, people you just met, people you have yet to meet.
People close to me can be unfamiliar to you.
People close to me can be unfamiliar to me,
and yet you, who have never met them, see yourself in their faces.
The simple task unites us;
unites me and them and you and them and me and you
in looking.