CATOPTROPHILIA is a 3D animation film structured around the encounter between two objects belonging to two different, distant historical moments, but whose complex set of symbolic functions are, in a way, intimately connected: an Egyptian hand mirror from the New Kingdom (XV C. BC) dedicated to Hator, goddess of beauty, and an iPhone 4 Elite, released by Apple, California, in 2011.
In a narrative that crosses different civilizations and historical moments, the piece stresses how the human tendency to create images has depended, from ancient times to the current moment, on the supply of mineral resources; resulting in the emergence of a system of slavery in which a dominant class (aristocracy in the past, the citizens of the so called first world in the present) has access to the creation of their own image; an image, that, in return, exerts a different type of submission, of dependance, upon them.
DAVID FERRANDO GIRAUT
Catoptrophilia