Ave Imperator

Tomas Laurenzo · 2024 · Generative video

Content note: war, displacement, injury, fear, and loss.

The artwork

Ave Imperator examines the relationship between political power, mediated speech, and the suppression of vulnerable voices within contemporary geopolitical conflict.

The work uses recordings of official public appearances and press briefings by presidents and prime ministers. Their institutional settings remain intact: podiums, flags, microphones, calibrated gestures, and the visual grammar through which political authority presents itself. The words spoken in the altered recordings correspond to testimonies given by Palestinian children living in the Gaza Strip.

The resulting dissonance places accounts produced under conditions of extreme vulnerability within images of institutional authority. The work considers how political and media systems determine whose speech is amplified, recognized as credible, or relegated to the margins.

Context

Completed in 2024, Ave Imperator emerged in response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza following the attacks of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent military campaign. This text records the circumstances in which the artwork was produced; it is not a continuously updated account of the war.

In February 2024, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child stated that no child in Gaza was free from fear, pain, and hunger.

“Real-time injustice, even of the most epic sort, is often simply not recognized as such at the time, no matter how obvious the injustice later appears. Man is hard wired to submit (adapt) to any condition and then consider it normal. Our acceptance of injustice is reinforced by the going ideology.”

Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion, 2005, p. 43.

Method and ethics

The intervention is deliberately restrained. Synthetic audiovisual techniques align the testimonies with the gestures and vocal patterns of political leaders while preserving the recognizable surface of official communication.

The work does not invent testimony or present the altered recordings as documentary evidence. It recontextualizes accounts published by humanitarian organizations and journalists. Synthetic media is used here not to fabricate an event, but to examine the unequal conditions under which speech is amplified, authorized, and believed.

The title refers to the Latin salutation associated with Roman imperial authority. The image of power is preserved while narrative agency is transferred, temporarily and uneasily, to those who possess no comparable institutional power.

Artwork record

Artist
Tomas Laurenzo
Year
2024
Medium
Generative video
Format
Single-channel video
Source material
Official press appearances and documented testimonies from Gaza

References

Exhibitions and screenings