Concept:

The starting image is a photograph of a television screen, taken on 13 January 2011 during a programme devoted to the criminal case known as the Beasts of Satan. The face is not treated as an individual portrait, but as an image already mediated by television and charged with collective pathos.

Television does not merely broadcast images: it tells — and may implant — a vision, a tell-a-vision of reality, helping to determine how an event is perceived and sedimented within the collective imagination.

Throughout the five stages of Acentric Reconversion, the image undergoes a sequence of digital transformations conceived as artistic and alchemical passages. The intervention does not alter the facts, diminish individual responsibility or negate the necessity of justice. Instead, it acts upon the psychic and media-generated form through which the event continues to operate within consciousness.

The final image is a blank white sheet. It corresponds to the alchemical albedo — the whitening associated with purification, washing and the emergence of clarity after decomposition. The white does not erase the event, cancel responsibility or restore an imagined innocence. It suspends the hold of the preceding image, releasing the perceptual field from its emotional saturation and returning it to a state of receptivity.

Albedo is therefore not the conclusion of the process, but its final visible threshold. The reconversion is completed only through the viewer’s action. Because the images are integrated sequentially into a daily newspaper — an emblem of both the news and the here and now — the viewer must physically turn its pages. The work thus culminates in the gesture of “turning the page, here and now”: a transition from the passive reception of an image to responsibility for one’s own gaze.

The symbolic forgiveness evoked by this gesture should not be understood as absolution, repression or oblivion, but as the suspension of the psychic bond that sustains the egregore: the collective thought-form through which violence may continue to reproduce itself in fear, hatred and the collective imagination. A fact remains a fact; what may be transformed is the quality of consciousness with which it is received, processed and returned to the world.