Foucault's Double

Foucault’s Double This film explores notions of family and legacy in Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. The painting is a curious mixture of shifting reference points where the subject and viewer swap places infinitely as they observe the painter watching them, watching the princess and her courtiers, while her parents form a ghostlike image caught in a mirror behind them, perhaps observing all. For me this picture points to the replacement of parents by their offspring and foretells our/their mortality. The work utilises the essay by Michel Foucault as the basis for a script. This piece of writing has been interwoven with the last interview Foucault gave before his death. My work with film plays with the idea of the lecture and the documentary as artworks. By fusing them together in what I call the docu-lecture I try to tease out meaning in a mixture of text and image more commonly associated with television documentary. (I explore this also in my artwork film – The Lecture as Palimpsest - vimeo.com/138198229 )