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banners and signs in Tahrir Square.
Melina Nicolaides’ original concept for the
film project, as she explains it, dealt with the
reality that despite the global connection that
exists between us in today’s world, our essen-
tial isolation from one another, our cynical sep-
arateness, our collective solitude, is perhaps the
great controversy of our time. Having filmed
all of her underwater footage of rising, splitting
bubbles, her idea was to evoke the perception
of consciousness, of states of being, together-
ness vs. isolation. Clusters of bubbles were to
symbolise a shared solitude – perhaps of each
bubble, like man, breathing in solitude in the
ephemerality of a lifetime.
While working through hours of this under-
water footage in January 2011 and having re-
cently returned from a trip to Egypt, the artist