Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dino Desica and the Rhinoplastic Procedure begins with an actual surgical procedure and uses it as raw material from which to construct a fictional episode in the life of Dino Desica.
Filmed on a mobile phone, the work incorporates the circumstances surrounding the procedure: consultations, waiting rooms, masks, medical environments, restrictions and recovery. Rather than attempting to conceal the conditions of COVID-19, these become part of the work’s visual and narrative language, capturing the strangeness of a period in which everyday behaviour had itself begun to feel staged.
The work continues Norman Mine’s use of ordinary lived situations as material for constructing Dino’s fictional biography. Nothing needs to be invented entirely. Instead, reality is selected, framed and reorganised through the camera until an everyday event begins to operate as fiction.
At its centre is the unstable authority of the image. If something really happened but is filmed, edited and attributed to a fictional character, what exactly are we watching: documentation, performance or fiction?
The surgical procedure therefore becomes less important than the act of turning lived experience into an image, and the image into another fragment of Dino Desica’s continually expanding reality.
Shot on mobile phone by: Norman Mine
Edited by: Norman Mine
Performer: Dino Desica