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The Hypochondriac, 2006

Single channel SD video (60 min), photographs. Made with the assistance of the Australia Council New Work Grant and COFA Cité Internationale des Arts Residency.

 

Moliere's last play The Hypochondriac, translated from the original French with the awkward, syntactically inept help of Google Translate, is brought to the tele-stage with a single actor playing the roles of countless characters, as a bumbling, drooling child-prop crawls around, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall.

 

Meanwhile, Moliere himself roams the streets and alleys of Paris. He is horrified by a burgeoning knowledge that his world teems with illness-inducing bacteria. 

 

He tries to distract himself with various earthly activities, thereby burying his terror. 

 

He discovers, to his dismay, that once a thing is known, it cannot be un-known.

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