Installation, Filmstills on transparent Silk, Sound (Breath)

For my installation „Phantoms of Time” I worked with film material that was shot between the ’70s and the ’90s in my family circle, The amateur films show everyday scenes, captured by various family members on different occasions. In contrast to looking at photo albums, I was fascinated by the authenticity of the film, which shows not only one picture, but always contains a before and an after. This allowed me to experience a time that is the precondition of my very own existence but that I cannot experience. With the bond to the generations before me, I perceive the recordings as present, but to me they are history, because they originate from the time before I was born. I go back to the past from my point in the future, which I know, whereas the protagonists in the films don’t know it yet. The film material is a storage of time in which I can repeat and repeat again, like in a matrix, actions which really happened in the past. I take part in the mortality and vulnerability, the never-ending, inescapable change of the generations. The random nature of the shots opens up a feeling for eternity. For the eternal now, which alone forms our experience. The figures in the films are true, and yet it is only possible to capture a metaphoric, imaginary existence – they become bodyless phantoms of their own. […] The basis for an individual existence is the breath, from the first to the last. In the process of inhaling and exhaling, the cycle of birth and death, contraction and expansion becomes manifest – the polarities synergize. The sound of the breathing is omnipresent and at the same time being given. The individual experience of time is terminated – yet time doesn’t end with the end of an individual. Within the changing of generations, memories and experiences are carried – inescapably, we are confronted with the fragility of our own existence and the passing of the individuals. The breath projected into the space is meant to be carrying and to refer to an infinity beyond the personal.

im Juli 2021