Sound & Vision: AUGURE: Infinite Trolling
A journey into belief, grief and cultural identity, told through the phantasmagoria of Africa and four characters stigmatized for witchcraft, Baloji’s AUGURE is set for its UK and US theatrical release this April. Taking the Prix de la Nouvelle Voix (New Voice) at Cannes 2023, and as Belgium’s 2024 Oscars submission, the choral film marks the Belgian-Congolese artist and director’s feature debut – and the starting point for a new short film, AUGURE: Infinite Trolling.
A comment on increasingly short attention spans, captured on location in the Congo, AUGURE: Infinite Trolling toys with the infinite scroll that fuels social media – and this erratic stream of content as a path to desensitization. Oscillating between narratives, the film moves through a series of disjointed yet intertwined vignettes, finding a disquieting sense of the surreal in the art of assemblage. Becoming a celebration of the extended listening experience, each sequence accompanies a different track from AUGURE’s ambitious four-album soundtrack – written from the perspectives of its four characters, and released via Polydor (Universal Music Group).
Against a world that fuels division and polarizes opinions, Baloji approached the project as a small exercise in empathy, positioning each sequence as another side of the story, deserving equal contemplation. Within the context of the individual perspectives at AUGURE’s core, AUGURE: Infinite Trolling casts a creative lens over the limitations of modern society, considering how we process and prioritize information – and shape opinion – in an era of cognitive saturation.
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