PROMETHEUS

In the first post-Soviet-era Olympic games in 1992, the "Dream Team”— a group of superstar NBA basketball players— swept away all opposition, going on to win the gold medal for the USA. The team’s unquestionable dominance coincided with, and reflected, a new era of global politics, embodied in the U.S technological and environmental assault on Iraq a year prior.

Aivazian’s film draws parallels between these two events as paradigm shifts in hard and soft power, exploring the celebration of violence that occurs in the passing of the torch, both literal and metaphorical. Fire is the main trans-historical narrative motor here, a fire only momentarily contained, only partially domesticated, but repeatedly mobilised, since its theft from the heights of Mount Olympus, to its unleashing on the oil fields of Kuwait.

Using mainly found footage, the film splices multiple scales, from lighting speed technological warfare, to unfathomably permanent environmental damage, from the lighting of ancient fires by channeling solar explosions occurred light years in the past, to grains of sand speckled with the chemical warfare testing the future. Besides the technicity ignited by the discovery of fire, the film also surveys the extractive impulses that weaponise other technologies, from black oil to black bodies, from the ability to track missiles and people to the ability to conceal a plane, or a motive, or a war crime.