JULIA ZURILLA

Silent Miami, 2024

Silent Miami is an experimental multichannel video installation that juxtaposes archival 8 mm vacation footage from 1926 South Florida with imagery of atomic bomb tests conducted at Bikini Atoll during the 1940s. Presented across five independent screens, the installation combines silent black-and-white moving images with sudden flashes of ultramarine blue, transforming the nuclear explosion into both a visual rupture and a source of artificial illumination.

Using circular masks inspired by stereoscopic and binocular vision, the project creates fragmented ways of looking at the same historical landscape. Scenes of leisure, tourism, and everyday life coexist with catastrophic imagery, generating a tension between serenity and latent destruction. Throughout the installation, gestures extracted from the archival footage are transformed into animated GIFs that reappear across the screens as fragmented traces of movement and memory.

The monitors are visibly interconnected through exposed cables that function both technically and symbolically, suggesting that the entire installation is powered by the energy of the ultramarine nuclear explosion itself. Through archival material, repetition, silence, and spatial fragmentation, Silent Miami reflects on the coexistence of the mundane and the catastrophic, proposing a meditation on memory, environmental anxiety, technological violence, and the fragile construction of paradise.

Technical Setup and Production: Rafael Núñez