The video, created by the artist collective NOW — Noa Geras, Olesya Gumenenko, and Waldemar Masicz, emerged from the Make Art at Your Own Risk class led by artists Thalia Hoffman and Manar Zuabi during the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg (August 2024).
At its core, the work meditates on the fragility of human presence within the machinery of war. Set in the heart of Salzburg’s old fortress, the piece centers on a sculptural object resembling a pyramid of cannonballs — weapons engineered for anonymous violence and erasure. The collective’s intervention stages a quiet dialogue with this monument of destruction, tracing the tension between material permanence and the disappearance of human memory. As the chalk figures drawn upon the cannonballs dissolve and fade, so too do the lives lost to war slip from recollection, leaving absence as their only record.