This video artwork contains 2 stories that visualize 2 scam emails from my “scam emails collection” that I received during 2016. The goals of those letters are similar to each other and clearly aimed at getting the personal data of the receiver. However, the elaboration of the narratives and the often beautiful written stories are convincing and give the reader a feeling of being personally addressed and thus involved.

The text and grammar of the original letters were untouched.

The both stories were shot in the original locations (West Africa and Europe) mentioned in the scam emails. This is an international project that involved creative groups from different continents.

Calentamiento Global appropriates and transforms old Mexican soaps, a type of television program that is a widely spread format in Azerbaijan’s (and most of the world) popular television experience. Huseynov selected a series of unrelated clips and replaced the normal voice-over (translating the dialogue from Spanish to Azeri) with an own, newly made text. The personal drama from the original soap is replaced with an ironic, at times sarcastic, dialogue on climate change. By employing a language that mediates between emotional, formal and scientific, the work feels surreal while being contradicted by emotional acting that evokes a strange sense of empathy.

The often humoristic superimposition of this new dialogue onto a traditional soap-opera, unmasks the demagogic narrative of Climate Change throughout the political spectrum at large. It captures its ironic reality that moves between denial, facts and emotions.