Galina Juritz
Dionysus Dies

‘DIONYSUS DIES’: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Tensions in the Anthropocene, Rejoicing in the Abject and Embracing the Perpetual Post Digital Mess

Time split at the seams of your departure. Everything is now before and after.

Heartache is a shape-shifting, non-linear monster. It manifests in the quiet resignation of mundane gestures, tasks performed with thespian heaviness. It sits at the helm of memory, flashing unwanted recollections like a malevolent zoetrope. It is the calling card of failure, in a society pathologically preoccupied with success: an anthem for all at odds with itself. Heartache is a sentence lived out in seconds; it follows lovers who left, ambitions that dwindled, the sound of the news at 1. With ​Dionysus Dies​ I wanted to engage with heartache on a structural level, cloning the intangible and painfully slow processes that constitute healing, sensemaking in the face of all that evades our understanding.

The process involved trawling through the digital barracks of recorded life, untangling fact from fiction, sifting through vaults of social sewage glowing like radioactive gibberish. The work is an audiovisual collage that attempts to map a coherent narrative throughout seemingly incoherent events - trying on tone, style and seriousness like items in a cramped cinematic wardrobe. It stages a curatorial improvisation that mirrors the improvisatory nature of life, departing but never arriving, and squeezing out a tune every now and then along the way. We must after all, whistle while we work.

This work is broadly situated in the remit of autoethnographic audiovisual research and existing discourse on post-digital aesthetics, music video, found material and and collage as a way of exploring contemporary themes. It seeks to find a moment of pause for the ephemeral and disposable, slowing down time so that we may take a closer look at these moments before they invariably disappear. The film’s containing narrative of a therapy session lends itself literally to the cause of processing. What is said in therapy is not necessarily rational nor is it well-articulated. These conversations are not canonised, but discarded so that the patient might move on, healing finding its home in this state of disposability and ephemerality.

At the time of the research, as the world changed in ever more unpredictable ways, the project itself became a way of engaging with unfolding events, and the methodology leaned increasingly towards a non-linear storytelling process. Confronted with a barrage of imagery - memorialised, fabricated, transient - I started to experience this surplus of post-digital aesthetics as a terrain of sensemaking through which to traverse. This sensemaking was not limited to the geopolitical events of the time. It was more specifically about the mediation and construction of self within uncertainty, within a grief that had existed long before, and a causality which would become increasingly apparent. In ​Dionysus Dies​ I explore three primary sites for grief:

Nature​: The spoilt stage that absorbs our melancholy and directs us to our own shameful complicity. Here, animals act as comedic protagonists, as angry captives: both chasing and chased, but never quite at ease, they slip in and out of their own agency.

Advancing Technology​: I attempt to capture humanity’s vulnerability in the face of agentic technology, our feeling ever more surveilled and confused by the digital selves reflected back to us in our devices, and their dissonance with our internal realities.

Temporality​ Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of the ‘leakage’ of memory influenced the idea of images and sounds escaping almost by accident into the body of the film - slipping out of history’s clutches; ​Dionysus Dies​ zooms in and out of the scales of time perceptible to the mourning subject.