Laurent Grasso’s recent film, OttO (2018), is a continuation of the artist’s enquiry into the origins of human knowledge. Engaging with a diverse range of philosophies spanning the scientific, historical, religious, and spiritual, Grasso contemplates the intersection of material and immaterial worlds. Filmed on location in the Australian desert of the Northern Territory, OttO was produced in collaboration with the Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation and their aboriginal communities. In OttO, one is conducted on an aerial tour of ancient Australian geographies by a group of futuristic, floating spheres traveling silently across the landscape. These translucent orbs represent abstract materializations of secret stories; spiritual dreaming places imagined as vital and conscious forces. This fictional encounter between cutting-edge video technology and a narrative cartography – imperceptible to the non-initiated – offers a voyage in time marked by immaterial presences. Grasso employed thermic and hyperspectral cameras as well as drones to scan and measure the radiation being emitted from the Earth, to assemble a visually-stunning story that intertwines fiction, reality, faith, and science.
