Double Negative

Two 16mm films simultaneously project images of Le Corbusiers iconic white Villa Savoye outside Paris and its doppelgänger a black copy located in Canberra Australia Each film has been printed on 16mm stock as a negative image or polarity print thus reversing light and dark The Antipodean black Villa Savoye is in fact an ethnographic institute dedicated now to the digital duplication of its extensive collections of anthropological films photographs slides and sound recordings as Siegel reveals in a high definition colour video The work enacts the infinite loop of recorded artefactsthe urgency to document and record vanishing rituals and cultural practices becomes instead the contemporary archival impulse to copy vanishing media formats to digital These concatenated elements extend the artists engagement with architecture as a foil enacting and revealing across constellationlike works layered sociological and aesthetic concerns