How is such barbarity possible in the late twentieth century?” This is a false question. There is no atavistic resurgence of some archaic type of violence. This violence of old was both more enthusiastic and more sacrificial than ours. Today’s violence, the violence produced by our hypermodernity, is terror. A simulacrum of violence, emerging less from passion than from the screen: a violence in the nature of the image (75).
Extract from “Heysel”, Jean Baudrillard, 1986
Spread across ten collages, Marcin Dudek’s series “Heysel” from 2021 animates the degradation of an aerial view of a stadium to the motion of a crowd in turmoil. Starting with a semi-figurative reproduction of a photograph of the Heysel stadium from the 1950s, taken during an event where the crowd was dispersed organically, the works quickly abandon this more figurative style to descend into chaos. While the first work clearly shows the stadium, the last is based on the famous photograph from the Heysel stampede of 1985, in which a crowd of people is pushed up against a collapsing wall, their faces tormented by the sheer force of the mass. While this is a contemporary scene, the artist uses roman numerals to harken back to the bloody amphitheaters of the past, where it was human violence itself which was on spectacle.