The protests are going on. Every morning I wake up to seeing a new video or photo, uncountable new videos and photos. The quality is so poor that I have to open my eyes widely, take my mobile phone as close as possible, make the sound as loud as possible, to finally be able to recognize some vague figures running, shouting, taking a bloody body somewhere. asking for help, calling others to join them. Shouting, more than anything else. Someone is risking their life to wake me up make me believe that something violent is happening there. Still I resist to believe. I’ve already seen a lot of brutal things, some even made my whole body ache, still I think it cannot be true. Maybe someone has faked it, exaggerated it, added more warm colors to it. At least I hope so. I scroll down my homepage to see if it has become viral. If it has happened for real, people must be talking about it, everyone must have watched it as thoroughly as I did. I should not be alone at this pain. I can’t bear it on my shoulders all alone.
But everything seems to be authentic. She is speaking, you hear her voice. She sits in a car, you see the windscreen, there is a man there behind the wheel, you hear her talking to him. Out of the car all around them people are running, you hear the shooting, not only once, many times. But she keeps filming. At some point she cries: "look, the girl has been shot! " but they can’t stop. They have to keep driving. Even that doesn’t stop her from filming. At some point later, She decides to give the mobile phone to someone else, sitting at the backseats to continue filming. While doing so, you hear her get shot. The mobile phone falls down. It records for a second with a low angle shot, a face staring at you, eyes wide open, surrounded by enigmatic orange, red lights and shadows. The astonished look penetrates my body. I need some more time to process what has happened. I watch it forward and backward for some times, but it baffles me every time more than before.
I have a screenshot of the last moment of the video on my mobile phone. Sometimes I look at it again, as if I hope something might have changed on it. I google the name of th woman, search the hashtags on instagram. It appears again. without any warning about a sensitive content, maybe it has been mistaken by instagram for an abstract painting, which seems disconnected from reality. Sometimes I doubt if I‘m the only one seeing those eyes on it.