https://possessions-inc.mattsgallery.org/

The central image of Possessions_inc is a sculpture of a devil that stands at the door of the church in the village of Rennes Le Chateau South West France. The sculpture and the site are at the centre of an expansive web of theory and narrative: 'The Mystery of Rennes Le Chateau'. with clues coded into his posture and position. At the beginning of the 20th century the unexplained wealth of a local priest started talk of buried treasure. The mystery expanded in the 1960's with the production of a set of forged documents by a right-wing phantasist in collusion an aristocratic writer and broadcaster and associate of OuLiPo, followed by a publication by a French Surrealist , a series of BBC documentaries, the best selling book Holy Blood and Holy Grail, and later, the novel and film The Da Vinci Code. Now the Mystery  contains the continuation of the bloodline of Jesus Christ into the French aristocracy, various occult and theological mysteries, secretive cabals that operated across history, the lost ark, the hollow earth, aliens, and occult geographies. But nobody fully agrees what the mystery actually is. Recently the statue has become a player in the unfolding contemporary drama between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist models of the world,

In Possessions_inc, still images of the statue are animated using proprietorial software to ventriloquise sounds and texts - some authored, some collaged from a variety of sources - to narrate and demonstrate ways objects might become invested with ideas of agency and value. It talks about the narratives of Rennes-Le-Chateau, the Art Market, ideas of value, commodification, the virtual and digital, haunted images, money-laundering, hyper value, the internet of things, insurance companies, robotics, techno animism, Philip K Dick, drug-smuggling, ecstatic states, ventriloquism, the operations of the internet, codes, the nature and function of fakes, secret knowledge and problems presented by intelligent doors

The project started in late 2016, with 12 episodes to date, and will run through 2017 into 2018.