Grieving without soil: digital spectrality and the necessity of physical space in _when_scrolling_ becomes_scrying

Abstract

This article examines Janilda Bartolomeu’s _when_scrolling_becomes_scrying (2023) as an audiovisual meditation on grief in the digital age. Through close formal and visual analysis, it argues that the film stages the structural incompatibility between digital permanence and the need for closure in the grieving process. Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together media theory, spectral theory, and Black Atlantic thought (including the work of Lev Manovich, Mark Fisher, Édouard Glissant, and Gloria Anzaldúa), the article reads Bartolomeu’s film as both a singular portrait of loss and a node within broader transnational and diasporic networks of mourning. The article follows a three part structure. First, it analyses how the desktop documentary format generates a specific form of subjectivity that immerses the viewer in the database logic of digital experience. Second, it situates the film’s oceanic imagery within the Black Atlantic tradition. Third, it considers how the film theorises digital spectrality as a form of stagnation: a haunting that forecloses rather than enables mourning. The article concludes by examining the film’s decisive turn toward physical memorialisation—the creation of a ceramic sculpture of Bartolomeu’s deceased father—as an act of resistance against the immobilising temporality of cyberspace. Closure, the film proposes, requires grounding: soil, stillness, and embodied tactics of interruption.