All that is Solid Melts into Air Mark Boulos (via magritte and bos2008)
Artist Mark Boulos works with documentary film to investigate the relationship between ideas, ideology and materiality. In this two channel video installation, the corporate colonisation of Nigerian oil resources frames a clash of cultures and beliefs. Two factions indirectly battle over the control of petroleum. In Chicago, traders speculate on futures, representing a powerful financial and legal abstraction from material commodities. In the Nigerian delta, guerrillas wage war against the corporations that mine and exploit their land. The film focuses on the Ijaw people and the war god Egbisu, who inspires their struggle against foreign companies and their secessionist movement for independence, protecting them from bullets and machetes with charms made of leaves. Through this poetic exploration, contrasted by the religious beliefs of the guerrillas, Boulos investigates the fetishism of the city bankers and reveals the abstract and metaphysical nature of their beliefs.
