No One is an endurance-based video performance by Carlos Motta, with an original score composed by musician ELO, inspired by the final three lines of Paul Celan’s 1967 poem Ashglory:

No one
bears witness
for the witness

In the video, Motta faces the camera for 45 minutes, forcing himself to keep his eyes open. As time passes, fatigue sets in—his eyes redden, begin to blink, tear up, and eventually he begins to cry. The accompanying score is emotional and incisive and references the sounds of war—unmanned drones and other sonic remnants of militarized technology and layers them with words banned from government documents by the Trump administration. Together, these elements evoke the grammar of exclusion that speaks through the politics of the present.

The slowly unfolding performance invites the viewer to witness the act of witnessing and to confront their own implication within it. No One also confronts the notion of witnessing through the haunting evocation of dehumanization through murder, discourses of hate, erasure through bureaucratic procedures, and societal marginalization. Through a poetic reclamation of the language of barbarity, the work inscribes an act of resistance onto the act of seeing.

installation view at Mor Charpentier, Paris. Photos by Nicolas Brasseur