The Magic Lantern takes up an early predecessor of cinema, with which the ghosts of the French Revolution were ment to be brought back to life in late 18th century Paris. It deals with a little-known example of revolutionary video production: the young Carol Roussopoulos used the first hand-held video camera in the 1970s to support international liberation movements with her early films. Consisting of a digital film, a sculpture, a series of silkscreens and a tapestry, this work follows on Khalili’s investigation into the ethics and genealogy of solidarity from previous works.
For The Magic Lantern, Khalili reactivates Stephan Kaspar Robertson’s “phantasmagoria”. Robertson, a Paris-based Belgian magic lantern performer, invented the “phantasmagoria” in the time directly following the French Revolution. As a staged performance, the “phantasmagoria” combined storytelling and projected imagery “to let ghosts speak in public”. Those ghosts were deceased revolutionaries such as Marat or Robespierre, inciting the Parisians to pursue revolution. Articulating the birth of video as a revolutionary technology with the most ancient form of revolutionary performance, The Magic Lantern aims to recall the ghosts of revolutionary technologies and emancipatory ideas.