This project operates as both 19th-century music video and 21st-century video essay. More simply, a music video essay: a form in which music functions as an organizing logic rather than an accompaniment. It explores how memory inscribes itself across media by placing three acts of recall in correspondence. Francisco Goya etched and painted his Disasters of War (1810-1820), The Second of May 1808 (1814), and The Third of May 1808 (1814) years after the events they depict. Like Goya, Ana Vidovic performs Isaac Albéniz's Asturias (1892) from memory. I mapped her tempo directly onto my editing timeline, transforming plucked strings into cuts, images into melodies, and black sequences into moments of respite. Three acts of embodied memory converge: the artist's hands, the guitarist's fingers, and the editor's eyes and ear. 

When a video essay is cinematic in form, it tells a story through acts of revealing. Through staccato montage, gallery-simulated approach and retreat, and translucent overlays, I reveal Goya's visual grammar: recurring gestures and compositions that form a syntax for articulating atrocity. Because cinema imposes a tempo not the viewer's own, it intensifies accumulation. The images strike in rapid succession as a relay to the music. As Sontag wrote of Goya's etchings, "The cumulative effect is devastating." Cinema affords maneuvers that words struggle to convey: dissolves and juxtapositions visually express how Goya's works inform one another. Extended empty, dark passages function as ethical interruptions, withholding the image so that attention does not become consumption.

Inspired by Arthur Jafa's Love is the Message and the Message is Death (2016) and drawing from Robert Bresson's notes on sound, the music video essay is a form where music produces meaning, not merely mood. This particular work becomes an act of rhythmic remembrance, one that refuses the eye's quick exit and asks what it means to look, to listen, and to remember.