Morbid Angeles

2018

MORBID ANGELES

“I drove to Los Angeles last night and I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I’ve only ever felt this way one other time in my life. The entire energy was so heavy and evil. I didn’t see anything particularly bad and nothing negative happened, it was just this hauntingly eerie feeling. From the hills to downtown, I couldn’t shake it.” (reddit user)

“Hear me out. I know we all love LA. It’s a lot of fun and there are some great people here. But ever since I got here 4 years ago I’ve always felt that there’s a feeling in this city of a certain sinister evil that cannot be explained. Nobody has ever agreed with me until I met my boyfriend this year. He’s from NYC, and he told me that he feels a very insidious darkness here that is obvious from the moment he wakes up. He’s been here 8 months. I’m from SLC, and I’ve never felt this “evil” in any other city I’ve been. I’ve been to a lot of cities big and small, but this is the only one that I feel is actively out to get me. Don’t get me wrong. I love LA. I actually like this evil feeling, even though it gets to me sometimes, because it challenges me to grow. You can’t be complacent in LA or it will eat you alive.” (reddit user)

“I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter. But there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets. LA is a jungle.” (Jack Kerouac)

I could hardly believe it: the city of angels and stars, of surfing and eternal springs…

And yet it was real. I could feel it weighing on me, sense it all around me, everywhere: that feeling of latent menace, like a hum, a low, muffled drone surrounding you and following you wherever you go, like an oppressive spleen, amid misery, unease and torment.

The camera follows the traces of this malaise, dense and thick as the morning fog rolling in over the ocean; a dark probing into the cracks of Western civilisation, a sense of imminent disintegration, held together by a miracle yet on the verge of collapsing in on itself, in a foretold martyrdom.

A search for clues, lost in the darkness of the images and in the fractures they conceal; an oppressive gesture meant to confront us with the final sacrifice.