In this video, the action – or lack of action – takes place in a call centre.

First, you see an apparently uninhabited open working space, with panoptical qualities. Gradually, you realize there are people there – staff that is sleeping at its workplace.

Such inactivity offers two levels of reading. It can be understood in a subversive way as an act of passive resistance – and thus bringing into question the purpose of social power structure, functionality, norms, efficiency, promptness and competitiveness – or it can be interpreted in a broader social ambit, as a metaphor for a questioning vision of the course of things – apathetic, submissive, “asleep” – as regarding the power relations in the existing systems of social organization.

Via the title, this video also refers to the mythical episode of the conquest of Troy, a cultural benchmark of the western imagination. The artist’s intention is to establish a parallel between the images and the fate of that gullible and unwary city that slept while its foe, the enemy that was to destroy it, was already concealing at its very heart. Alternatively, it is possible to imagine a Troy that has already been stormed, and those lying bodies can be corpses that connect our imaginary with death itself – and death itself, according to an ancient Greek moral lesson, is the state of ultimate deliverance, where the body ceases to be dependent on necessity, its most important cause of enslavement. Or else, we can think that the workspace itself is bound to devour its inhabitants in the end.

The images show an increasing psychasthenic undifferentiation between individuals and place, as resistance processes of a neurasthenic nature are launched. Minimal action in the video is the means chosen by the artist to foster multiple readings.

The roots of this video can be found in the influence of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt and Hal Foster’s political and philosophical thinking on the artist’s mind, together with the fact that the artist was working at the time in a call centre.