Blinded

Info

Blinded is an immersive video-installation commissioned by Strange Cargo for the Cheriton Light Festival 2018.

In 1993 Cheriton was established as the Sangatte border checkpoint between France and England. With the town so closely located to Folkestone, the narrowest point of the English Channel, the current refugee crisis is most present due to the town’s geographical realities.

Klenz used press photographs of refugees seeking asylum in Europe and projected those onto the wall of a family house in Cheriton. The wall was coated in phosphorescent paint, which allowed for the projected images to only be visible for a limited time before disappearing into darkness, with other images being projected on top, fusing with the original image.


Blinded uses the inherently unstable and fugitive nature of the photographic image to describe some of the circumstances related to migrant and refugees’ conditions - of being in transition, of being homeless and having lost sight of the familiar. The piece responds to current political situation in Western society whereby the fear of a national invasion and the economic erosion by an ‘outsider’ increasingly throws into question whether moving across borders becomes even more difficult in years to come.