— Delphine Bedel

Archive
Press

Press: Fraction magazine, nr. 3

The Top 15 Photo Books of 2008!

selected by Melanie McWhorter (Photo-Eye magazine)

All that is solid melts into air – Notes on Tourism by Delphine Bedel
Authors: Delphine Bedel, Francesco Barnardelli, Rachel Esner, Bruno Latour, Marco Pasi, Olivier Rolin and Thibaut de Ruyter
Design by Esther Krop.
episode publishers, Rotterdam 2008

All that is solid melts into air, Notes on Tourism is a reflection on the work of artist and writer Delphine Bedel. From amusement parks and monuments, to camping and beach resorts, her photographs and writings document sites of tourism in diverse contexts. She brings into question the visual representation of leisure, architecture, and cultural artefacts.

This book explores three complex and controversial tourist destinations
and cultural heritages whose identity, use, and meaning have shifted radically over time: a giant Lenin statue buried in a forest of Berlin, the monumental Nazi holiday resort in Prora, and the nearby landscape of the Chalk Cliffs on Rügen as painted by Caspar David Friedrich, all located in Germany. As one of today’s largest world industries, tourism and leisure influence our way of life and reflect
upon shifting cultural, economic, social, and historical realities. The process of constructing meaning and interpretation through images takes center stage in the experience of tourism.

What is the relationship between architecture and identity? Who owns the past? What is the Romantic imagination of nature in relation to tourism today? Using her photographic research as a starting point, Delphine Bedel invited writers from diverse disciplines to contribute to the book, resulting in original and unexpected historical and critical perspectives on the relations between visual culture, tourism, and memory politics.

Language: English
Size: 24 x 17 cm, 64 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-90-5973-072-4

Read More

Documenta 12 Magazines
Online project by Multitudes magazine, Paris

“Multitudes was in fact contacted by the organizers of Documenta to respond to the three themes/questions/entries and to participate in the Documenta Magazines web platform.” E. Alliez

Read more : multitudes-icones

Documenta 12 Magazines

Read More

Catalogue: Exposition ‘Disobedience’ An ongoing  video library
Commisaire: Marco Scottini. 13 Janvier 27 Fevrier 2005
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
& PLAY Gallery, Berlin

Playtime in Orange
Texte de Jota Castro

La désobéissance est à l’ordre du jour. Si elle se manifeste de façon globale, il me semble qu’elle s’apparente avant tout à un nouvel individualisme qui génère un désir de changement en particulier en occident, lieu de toutes les contradictions, lieu où les formes les plus conservatrices de nationalisme se mêlent à la peur d’un monde beaucoup plus ouvert que celui que nous proposent les idéologies dominantes de notre siècle.

C’est probablement pour cette raison que le milieu artistique, individualiste par nature, se découvre un énorme potentiel de contestation, s’apercevant en cours de route que les relents idéologiques du siècle dernier peuvent servir de base visuelle à de nouvelles formes d’expressions artistiques.

Comment faire pour que cette trouvaille soit autre chose qu’un simple decorum ?

Comment éviter que les lacunes idéologiques soient la seule chose que le temps préservera de la majorité des travaux artistiques à base politique conçus de nos jours ?

Je ne pose pas ces questions pour y apporter des réponses immédiates mais pour servir de base à l’avenir. Toute réponse immédiate ne pourrait d’ailleurs être basée que sur l’empathie ce qui ne me plaît guère.

Mon choix pour le projet Désobéissance naît de mes propres doutes face à la façon dont ce type de comportement social est reflété dans le domaine artistique. Mon projet prend corps dans la confrontation de différentes vidéos. Celles choisies par Pierre Olivier Rollin montrent certains temps forts de la contestation belge, classiques de part leur facture, représentatives de grèves, jouant sur des formes qui en aucun cas ne peuvent être isolées de leur contexte social.

Ma vidéo Eurotrucks fut réalisée pendant la grève des camionneurs européens en 2000 qui bloqua la capitale de l’Europe pendant plusieurs jours. Cette vidéo montre des camions jouant une partition pour klaxons dans la rue de La Loi, siège de la Commission européenne. L’idée en est simple : confronter la brutalité de ce blocus avec la vision légère et surprenante d’une jeune femme dirigeant 5 camions apportant ainsi un peu de gaîté à une situation qui devenait oppressante pour les grévistes, les habitants et les fonctionnaires du quartier communautaire, lors d’une action qui fut l’une des premières grèves conjointes de l’histoire de l’Union européenne.

Le choix de Pierre Olivier Rollin et le mien montrent des moments forts de la contestation dans la vie politique du Benelux.
Le troisième volet de ma sélection présente lui une nouvelle manière de montrer la Désobéissance, sans virilité apparente, sans besoin d’exprimer une colère messianique face à une caméra. Ces choix permettent certainement de confronter l’origine de notre colère générationnelle avec la réalité du contexte social européen en 2005.

Playtime, la vidéo de l’artiste française Delphine Bedel, montre le corps nu d’une jeune femme sur un écran tandis que sur un autre écran défilent les images d’une ballade dans la ville de Nagele en Hollande. Nagele est une ville gagnée sur les polders et créée de toute pièce pour correspondre à l’utopie de la ville moderne du siècle passé, égalitaire, ennuyante, sans contradictions et peuplée d’habitants triés sur le volet selon des critères de sélection stricte inimaginables pour une personne saine de corps et d’esprit en 2005 : même religion, même classe sociale, mêmes racines, mêmes critères de santé, même respect de la tradition pour tous. En me relisant, je m’aperçois que ces critères ressemblent beaucoup à l’idée de base du processus de sélection des nouveaux membres de l’Union européenne.

C’est là que Playtime jouent à fond sur le désir de changement, celui-là même que les Ukrainiens expriment en arborant la couleur orange dans les rues de Kiev aujourd’hui. Le corps nu d’une femme, imparfait, parsemé de nombreux grains de beauté, comme abandonnés sur une surface blanche, un corps opposé à la ville de Nagele qui glisse dans un ennui continental, égalitaire, qui glisse dans un désir de ne pas perdre ses acquis, de ne pas perdre ce qui fait de l’Europe un modèle de progrès social, de ne pas perdre ce qui nous rend vulnérable face à ce qui semble ne pas préserver le passé, ce qui désobéit. Une main d’homme trace des lignes irrégulières sur les épaules nues, elle ne respecte aucune frontière, elle ne respecte pas la logique établie, elle ne demande aucune conservation, elle cherche au contraire dans ce désordre le changement.

C’est pour cette raison que Playtime est un de mes chocs artistiques de ces derniers temps. Sa vision provoque en moi le désir de tout rompre ; elle justifie le premier changement : celui de l’individu, celui qui est indispensable pour pouvoir être intellectuellement honnête avec son temps. Ce dos nu c’est notre continent, la main qui trace les lignes représente la recherche générationnelle du progrès social et Nagele c’est la monotonie de l’Europe d’aujourd’hui.

Que Désobéissance soit le début d’une recherche et non la preuve d’une supériorité intellectuelle, c’est tout ce qu’on peut demander à cette année 2005 qui commence.

Installation view

Play videos

Read More

Catalogue: Exhibition ‘Disobedience’ An ongoing  video library
Curated by Marco Scottini. 13 January- 27 February 2005
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
& PLAY Gallery, Berlin

Playtime in Orange
by Jota Castro

Disobedience is the watchword of the day. It manifested globally and it seems that it is primary linked to a new brand of individualism that generates the desire – especially acute in the western world – to change a place rite with contradictions, a place in which the most conservatives forms of nationalism are intermingled with a fear of a much broader, more open world than the one presented by the dominant ideologies of our area.

This is probably why the artistic world – individualistic by nature – reveals to us a vast potential for protest and we can see that the ideological fumes of the past century can be an excellent basis for new forms of basic expression. How can we prevent ideological gaps from being the only thing that will survive over time for most of the artistic works conceived up to our modern days? I am not posing these questions because I want an immediate answer, but rather, in order to use them as a basis for future investigation. Indeed, immediate responses are usually given to show empathy, something that I don’t care for at all.

My choice for the Disobedience project, something I really don’t care for at all. My choice for the Disobedience project originates from my doubts about the methods with which this sort of social behavior is reflected in the artistic sphere. My own project develops from a comparison between various videos. The ones chosen by Pierre Olivier Rollin show historic moments of protests in Belgium, classic in their methods, representative of the strikes, imbued by forms, which are indissoluble from their social context. My own video “Eurotrucks’ was produced in 2000 during the European lorry drivers’ strike that brought the capital of Europe to a standstill of several days. This video captures the lorries as they use their klaxon to perform a musical piece in Rue de la Loi (literally avenue of the Law in French), headquarters of the European commission. The idea is simple: compare the brutality of this blockade with the alluring and unexpected image of a young woman conducting an orchestra of five klaxons, bringing a bit of optimism to a situation that was becoming burdensome for the strikers, the residents and the officials of the European Community district, during one of the first unified strikes in the history of the European Union. Pierre-Olivier Rollin’s choice and my own illustrate difficult moments of protest in the political life of the Benelux. The third part of my selection presents new way of communicate Disobedience, without apparent ‘virility’, without the need to express a Messianic rage before the video camera. My choices allowed me to compare the origin of our generational wrath with the reality of the European context in 2005.

Playtime, the video by the French artist Delphine Bedel, projects the nude body of a young woman on a screen while image of a stroll through the city of Nagele, the Netherlands, are projected onto another screen. Nagele is a city built in the polder (land reclaimed from the sea) and was created by a team of architects to match as closely as possible the Utopian idea of the modern city of the last century: egalitarian, repetitive, free of contradictions and populated by a group of people, carefully selected according to set of strict criteria that would be unconceivable for any person of sound mind in the year 2005. The population has the same religion, social standing, origin, ancestry, parameter of health, and similar respect for the traditions of others. Rereading what I have written, I notice that these selection process of the new member states of the European Union. Playtime uses and plays on the idea of a desire to change, the same desire that the Ukrainians are voicing today by swathing their cities’ streets in orange. Compare the image of the naked body of a woman, with all of its imperfections, speckled with moles and blemishes, lying as if abandoned on a white surface, in stark contrast with the city of Nagele which slides downward in a continental, egalitarian boredom, that precipitates into the desire to maintain its conquests, to not lose what makes Europe a model of social progress and hold onto what makes it vulnerable in the face of what seems to dissipate the past, what is disobeyed. A man’s hand makes irregular lines along the woman’s nude shoulders with seeming disrespect for border and preset lines of logic, not asking for nay type of conservation, but rather, seeking changes in this disarray. This is why playtime represents an artistic shock that I’ve endured in the recent years. The vision of this video elicits in me the desire to shatter everything that is known: it justifies the first change, which begins with the individual, which is compulsory to have an intellectual integrity and honesty with respect to one’s area. This nude back is our continent, the hand that traces the lines represents generational research of social progress and Nagele stands for the monotony of today’s Europe.

That is why Disobedience is the first step of a research and not the proof of an intellectual superiority is all we can hope for in this dawn of 2005.

Installation view

Play videos

Read More

Publication: Exhibition Playtime, Cargo, Almere 2004

The Glow and the Reason
by Nina Folkersma

Still a little woozy from a party the night before, on a Saturday afternoon in July, I step into Delphine Bedel’s studio. She offers me a cup of tea and gets right down to it. This afternoon, she is going to tell me about her new project for Cargo in Almere, but first, she shows me some of her earlier work. She puts a tape into the video player, a compilation of her videos and performances. I watch as amusement parks, Halls of Mirrors, roller coaster rides and sugar candy pass me by. Labyrinths of light, sound and motion. Everything turns, revolves. A little girl spins around in a circle, twirling around the camera. A house tips over and falls on its head, again and again. My stomach, too, is beginning to churn.

Delphine tells about her fascination with ‘dizziness, vertigo and speed’, specifically in relation to today’s culture of amusement. Because of tourism, commerce and marketing, our cities are increasingly being changed into a kind of entertainment park: environments in which our experiences are completely regulated, as if each experience had been determined in advance. It is within such ‘scripted spaces’ – a term borrowed from Norman Klein, the American historian of urbanism and mass media – that Delphine seeks ways of experiencing something personal and real, ‘the delightful loss of control in a controlled space’. With the camera, she tries to hold on to this experience – the ‘high’, the dizziness, the glow, as both a visual and a physical experience. I can fully confirm that she has succeeded, certainly in the latter.

For Cargo, she wants to create three new works. The first will be a video panorama about the village of Nagele in Holland’s Northeast Polder. This village was built in the 1950s as one of the first of the Netherlands’ ‘model villages’. In a relatively short time, the Dutch government conjured a fully-formed town out of earth reclaimed from the sea, a place intended for a community of agricultural workers, people working and defining the land. According to Delphine, you can view Nagele as a forerunner of the city of Almere, another of the model cities thought up by the Dutch government for the new polder.

Nagele was designed by the famous architects of De 8 en Opbouw, including Gerrit Rietveld, J.B. Bakema, Aldo van Eyck and Cornelis van Eesteren. Characteristic of designs by these representatives of the modernist New Objectivity movement are the straight lines, strict order, functional arrangement and most of all, the flat roofs. Even today, people still argue about whether houses with pointed roofs should be allowed in Nagele. Delphine describes what it looks like today, an old-fashioned, monotone village of identical row houses and an empty, deserted centre. A bit creepy, even, ‘almost like Twin Peaks’. My first impression, leafing through a book about Nagele that Delphine hands me, is that it is all rather dismal. (1) It is empty, bare, flat. Where is the ‘high’ here, the dizziness? What in heaven’s name is Delphine Bedel – used to the big urban spectacle and the context of scripted spaces – going to do with this endless, flat polder?

Reading more closely, I find that I am mistaken. Here too, the space is filled with directed experiences, here too it is bursting with prescribed intentions and scenarios. In Nagele, I am told, one will ‘experience a feeling of solidarity and belonging’, be imbued with ‘the sense of community’ and live in harmony with nature. The New Objectivity architects clearly had in mind just which experiences they intended their homes and town planning to generate. They strove to achieve nothing less than a ‘new feeling for life’. Virtually everything was planned to the minutest of details. Not only details concerning the social and religious composition of the population, but even their psychological makeup had all been meticulously taken into consideration. The official criteria for the character of the ‘solid type of person’, they planned for was ‘rationality, sobriety and a materialistic and practical temperament’.

Delphine tells me about the second video work she wants to make for Cargo. As a counterpoint to the rectilinear logic and rationalism of Nagele, she envisions a work that is most of all intimate and personal in nature. She hasn’t absolutely decided on the form and content, but it will probably be a video of someone drawing lines between the freckles on her body . She shows me a photograph, a video still from a video – her bare back filled with random lines and planes, like a capricious city map. It is sensual and organic – everything that Nagele is not. Then I remember that Delphine had also used this method – juxtaposing two totally different experiences – for a project realized in Vienna in late 2001 (2). Here too, she had placed two video productions across from one another: one of a calm and misty view of Vienna, filmed from a revolving restaurant with a panorama view, juxtaposed with an orgasmic explosion of light and colour, filmed in the famous Prater amusement park, also in Vienna. No explicit value judgements, just the one in balance with the other, playful and contemplative at the same time. This method of working is characteristic of Delphine Bedel. She dives deep into her subject, conducts extensive research ahead of time, but for the finished work has discreetly retreated to the background. Stepping back, she leaves space for someone else’s experience.

When I leave, Delphine gives me a sketch of the third work she will show in Cargo. Two neon texts are to be installed in the entrance, one on each side of the passage to where her videos will be projected. ‘Play and No-Man’s-Land’. Exactly. This is where her work is to be found. Between play and anonymity – with all the space in between to approach the work itself.

Notes:
Nagele, ed., Anneke van Veen, photography Theo Baart, Cary Markerink, Fragment Publishers, Amsterdam 1988
Das Experiment 8, Secession, Vienna. October-November 2001

Read More

Press: Mister Motley nr.1 – feb 2004, Inge de Boer

Verhalen en ontmoetingen
Wenen, ik ben er nog nooit geweest. Wenen, Ik denk aan taartetende dametjes, gedresseerde paarden, de sofa van Freud en het paleis van keizerin Sissi….Ik zie beelden van het geheime ondergrondse Wenen en de mysterieuze harde schaduwen in de stad boven de grond uit de film The Third Man van Orson Welles. En het Prater, het altijd aanwezige amusementspark aan de rand van de stad. Als ik ooit naar Wenen ga is een onbevangen blik niet meer mogelijk, toch heeft de hele mix aan indrukken en beelden die ik in mijn hoofd meeneem weinig van doen met de werkelijkheid. En als ik dan in die stad rondloop, breng ik met mijn herinnerin-gen de verbeelding van Wenen de stad binnen. En ik voeg er mijn eigen verhalen aan toe.

Delphine Bedel werkte een maand in Wenen op uitnodiging van de Wiener Secession, een museum in de binnenstad. Bedel vindt de grondstoffen voor haar werk meestal op straat. Ditmaal vroeg ze inwoners, kunstenaars, musici en journalisten om haar mee te nemen naar interessante plaatsen en tijdens deze stadswan-delingen ontdekte ze allerlei verhalen. ‘Met een plattegrond, een fototoestel en opname-apparatuur verzamelde ik beeld- en geluidsmateriaal, verhalen en indrukken die later op verschillende manieren werden verwerkt: tot video’s, posters, foto’s en geluidskunstwerken.’ Tijdens de opening gaf een Weense kunstenaar een concert met de geluiden en bliepjes uit twee GameBoys.

Brussel: Mapping
Verpretparking wordt het wel eens genoemd, de ontwikkeling van steden tot een soort thema-park voor toeristen en winkelende mensen. Planning van de stad, reclame en amusement bepalen het straatbeeld en we wandelen door een stad waarin bijna alles in scripts lijkt voorgeschreven. Hoe verhoudt deze sfeer zich tot de persoonlijke ervaring? Hoe kunnen we op straat nog een intieme ervaring of ontmoeting hebben, vraagt Bedel zich af en met haar werk creeert ze situaties waarin zo’n ervaring plaats kan vinden.

Voor ‘Mapping’ maakte ze 18 stickers in een grote opiage van teksten die ze op straat heeft gefotografeerd. Ze heeft daar een heel archief van verzameld: slogans, billboards, woorden uit reclameteksten en etalages. Deze stickers plakte ze op de ramen van de winkels in winkelcentrum Gulden Vlies Galerijen in Brussel. Ditmaal bracht ze de stad, de stad als geschreven tekst, de shopping mall binnen. Dat is de piek bij uitstek waar ons handelen geregisseerd en uniform lijkt en volgens onzichtbare regels lijkt te verlopen. Bedel gunt je een moment waarop kleine vragen, temidden van het kopen, de snelheid en de roes kunnen worden gesteld.’DO YOU DREAM’ en •ET VOUS, QUE FAITES-VOUS DANS LA VIE?’ Ook deelde ze stickers uit aan bezoekers van de mall om ze mee naar huis te nemen. Het werk van Bedel is een kado, een intieme gedachte in de kille buitenwereld.

Rotterdam: Real Life
Voor een project in kunstruimte Witte de With gebruikte ze de sticker als een gordijn. Net als andere toeristen verbaasde ze zich over de Hollandse gewoonte om de gordijnen ‘s avonds open te laten zodat je bij iedereen naar binnen kunt kijken. De spanning tussen buiten en binnen is op die momenten goed voelbaar, en Delphine Bedel heeft dit gegeven in haar werk omgekeerd door letters uit een stickervel te snijden en dat vel vervolgens als raambedekking te gebruiken.

‘Reality Check‘: Stukjes dagboek waren te lezen terwiji de buitenwereld door de letters heen schemerde. Deze dagboekteksten waren afkomstig van Internet, en beschreven intieme situaties als ruzie maken, vrijen en koken. Ze hadden dus al een publiek bestaan en zoals je ‘s avonds lopend over straat ongevraagd getuige bent van huiskamertaferelen, zo kon je hier in de tentoonstellingsruimte ook een intieme wereld van vreemden binnentreden.

Mister Motley, nr. 1 ‘Op Straat’

Read More

Catalogue: solo exhibition ‘Das Experiment’, Secession, Vienna 2001

Delphine Bedel, interviewed byPatrick Dax and Carola Platzek

What was your image of Vienna before coming here?
It was above all the social imaginary built through films, novels, press, music, popular culture, and the internet, gathering impres­sions of the place and of different social and political situations.
What does it mean to come to Vienna: a visit to Berggasse 19, a trip to the Ferns wheel in the Prater? Or for instance, if you look at the story of “The Third Man”, it is based on a novel taking place in Post-World-War-ll Vien­na, which was turned into a movie. I could wish to visit some of the original locations of the movie, like the sewer, and discover that it is a tourist attraction today, with actors playing out some of the scenes. There is a play bet­ween the fictive and the real, where the public image of a place is constructed by fiction and entertainment, rather than history. Perhaps this is even a motive for people to come here. I lived for a month in an apartment in Vienna, which is actually used as a psychotherapy office. It was an ironic and meaningful experi­ence. But what is or is not relevant to see? Who is an un/reliable narrator, do I need a map or a cell phone?

How did you approach the “real” city? As a kind of contemporary flaneur? No, I would obviously be closer to the urban “derive” of the Situationists rather than the fla­neur as described by Walter Benjamin. I made most of these “drifts” through Vienna with people I met here through friends, asking them to show me their favourite place or any­thing that is relevant to them. There is no goal to most of this walks. It is a process of collec­ting sounds, images, according to certain topics in my works, or stones and memories I heard. I take the city as a structure of con­fluence between attraction and distraction. Attraction relates to desire but also to gravity and entertainment. In French the word “distraction” means to be distracted, to lose your attention from something, but it also means amusement. Can I experience the city as something other than a “scripted space” as described by Norman Klein, looking at the way architecture is used to tell us stories, what is remembered or forgotten, how spaces are configured as a narrative journey, where the audience becomes the central character. Walking through the city I see what’s visible and what might be hidden, which could mean, what’s revealed from history and what’s not.

The term of the flaneur is often connec­ted to investigation, collection, obsession, compulsion, repetition … Yes, the “compulsion of repetition”! Possibly a Freudian aspect in my work. There are very obsessive parts – like I have this “Perecian” way of making these impossible inventories and archives like all the names that are in the city, all this written text displayed on shopping windows or billboards. I have a variety of ar­chives from every place I’ve been to. In my video works I focus more on amusement and speed. In a way it is an absurd, poetic, impos­sible, playful attempt, a never-ending process,to read the city and popular culture as an alternative form of literature, and an experien­ce of different motion in an urban surrounding. I am curious in particular about theme parks and amusement areas, where you are suppo­sed to have fun, like a replay of childhood at a higher speed. The shifting of a city through tourism, urbanism, shopping malls to an apparent entertainment.

You are operating with different layers, it seems like a play with the obvious and the hidden. I see my work as part individual and part collective. I try to capture daily situations or information, where collective memory is shif­ted to a familiar but unstable territory to be experienced again.

You oppose the rather selective gaze of the city-dweller to the more cohesive view of the panorama. One of the two videos I made for the exhi­bition is called “Aussicht”, a real loop in time and space, in a take of 26 minutes. A young woman is sitting in a cafe, in a rather calm manner, while the whole background behind her is shifting. It is almost a still image. The piece started with the idea of the panoramic view as a sublime. Normally, the Donauturm, which can be considered as entertainment architecture, offers an “Aussicht”. It’s a turning 360 degree panoramic view of the city. But I was filming on a foggy day, so the panorama seems to be erased. Vienna can only be recognized in a fragmentary way. It is just a Viennese afternoon in a cafe. A singular experience finds itself in a structured sur­rounding.

Your work seems to have a lot to do with individuals being addressed by their envi­ronment, being subjected to advertising-slogans, the signs of the city. Do you think that the political situation in Austria is reflected in the signs of everyday life? I believe that there is a form of contamination in language and attitudes. It draws attention and discussion towards other topics, while opening public space to a certain form of discussion that did not have so much space before.

Actually, it’s a kind of symptom that society constructs an illusion of the priva­te. There is a collective shift to entertain­ment and the many possibilities of amu­sement. You have been in the Prater a lot, why?
Public space and private space are becoming mixed up, the public and the private view. New technologies are autonomously develo­ping their own systems of control, like Sim-city as a home model of city development. In rela­tion to these different kinds of control, the idea of the private is a disappearing concept. The private is obsolete. It’s nostalgia. Vienna is one of the few cities in Europe that has had a permanent amusement area for a long time, that is part of the daily culture. I wondered about how it is entertaining or boring? The site is defined to be experienced in a certain way, you are supposed to feel free and to lose control. But there is a precise pat­tern behind it that decides certain things you can and cannot do. The second video “Extasy” was made in the Prater in one of the rides. The whole vision gets blurred by speed and extreme motion of the attraction. That’s the delightful loss of control in a controlled space.

Losing control in a controlled space? Sounds obscure to me. In a designed space, rather than a controlled space. In this second video the landscape dis­appears as well. In both videos the body is moved by a machine in search of a visual or physical moment, as a kick, a simulated and stimulated immediate experience.

You use different media in your work, like photography, video, and sound. Your installation produces a vertical, poly-perspective view of the city in itself. It mixes up listening and seeing. It takes the viewer on imaginary trips. What is the relation between vision and sound in your installation?While relating to a cinematographic aspect in my work, I’m looking for this kind of moment that, up to a certain degree, can re-create the “experience” of amusement. My work reflects on the different rhythms of moving in the city, from the slow motion of the walk to the extreme speed of amusement parks, on the difference in perception and senses, from an extended vision like the panorama to the fragmented and dislocated cityscape. To open a space where encounters and transmissions of experiences and atmos­pheres become possible.

Recorded in the Hotel Orient, Vienna, 8 November 2001

Read More