“BASED ON A TRUE STORY

The habit of confessing one’s faults to someone else has been around for centuries and it shows no signs of declining in importance. At least this is the idea that ‘Amen Nemmen’ by Vince Briffa seems to be expressing. Briffa’s installation also reminds us, however, that the location of the confession has changed: today, the priest’s confessional has been replaced to a great extent by the television screen. The interlocutor has changed as well, the priest’s friendly ear being replaced by an anonymous, nationwide audience. The logic behind this transformation is based on the idea that if you are prepared to confess your mistakes to someone, you might as well confess them to everyone. What is gained by having an infinitely wider audience is free publicity, which is disallowed in the Christian sacrament of penance (the priest being bound by a vow of secrecy). The fear of collective prejudice and marginalisation of the self - kept at bay by the institutionalisation of confessional secrecy - is now overtaken by an urge to go public, to turn one’s transgression, conversion and confession, into a public relations exercise. By protecting the confessant’s identity, the sacrament of penance reveals itself to be similar in its discreetness to the democratic principle of the secret vote, while the media-oriented, public confessions present in Briffa’s installation come closer to the modern, democratic idea of transparency. For the benefit of reality TV, individuals regularly expose their unimportant lives to thousands of unknown television viewers, transforming their small narratives into models of behaviour and religious proselytising.

What links all the characters in Vince Briffa’s installation is that they are “small” people who believe that something “big” has happened to them, something that they feel deserves to be aired to the general public. Like Saint Augustine, their confession is also their conversion; indeed, a sincere religious confession either presupposes a religious conversion or requires a simultaneous quest for one (the confessant’s disclosure of his or her past mistakes can also constitute a personal way of finding God). In ‘Amen Nemmen’, these ‘minor’ characters, presented as icons would against a plain, neutral background, reveal their past misdemeanours or problems (drug abuse, sexual misconduct, sickness, depression) and their eventual encounter with God. The genre they use is autobiographical (again, Augustine comes to mind) and they discover (or are encouraged to discover) this Presence through prayer. This meeting with God takes place “inside”: their conversion is not only an experience of sudden cleansing or enlightenment but also a form of self-examination. Confessing to a camera is therefore the modern equivalent of Socratic introspection. Knowing the self through God (or knowing God through the self) is not only important as a personal experience but also as an event that is communicable. In Briffa’s installation, what is communicable is a collective confession of faith; all those faces ask us at once to subscribe to their version/conversion and their religious beliefs. The incredible nature of some of their stories turns their experiences to TV scripts but we are expected to accept their stories as “true” fiction, scripts that are “based on a true story”.

Michel Foucault once called Western man a “confessional animal”. For Foucault, confession has been useful as a tool for the production of truth since the Middle Ages. Confession is, so to speak, the ‘coming to the surface’ of truth. For all the individuals in Briffa’s slides, photographs and moving images, their confessions guarantee the authenticity of their experiences, their changed life or their enriched or newly-found faith. The veracity of their inner transformation is proven by their willingness to go public. I believe (nemmen), and you must believe too.”