ABSTRACT
In her award-winning video installation Extramission 6 (Black Maria) (2009), Lindsay Seers projects a biographical fantasy inside a tar-papered reconstruction of the Black Maria, Thomas Edison’s first film production studio built in New Jersey in 1894. In a humorous and moving mockumentary, narrated by actors impersonating her mother, an art dealer and a psychologist, Seers mythologizes her life story by fusing it with the history of photography and cinema. In this documentary Seers’s artistic alter ego refuses to speak until the age of eight. A psychic consulted by her mother ascribes this to Seers’s traumatic experience at birth. A psychologist later explains that as a child Seers had photographic memory. This allowed her to experience herself and the world around her in timeless unity, which made language unnecessary to her.
