the installationpiece: Retrospective
The installation consists of four parts:
A bridge through time: from the new studio building to the place where the people who are working there, have worked before.
A rehousing means you leave your old place. The times you have spent there, how the light fell through the windows, the views, how it sounded and smelled, what that has done to you, who you've been there. You take your furniture and your stuff with you. These appear in a new space and a new environment. The same piece of furniture will be experienced anew and is yet familiar at your new place. Also you take yourself and your memories with you to your new place. Two times and places make contact.
The video in the magazine rack between the two chairs of the waitingroom furniture is shot through the old windows of my studio in New Rollecate. The glass is old, and therefore it is not as smooth and straight as modern glass. The images are distorted, if you move you see how the imperfections in the glass break your view. Looking back to the past, your memory is distorted: your memories are fragmentary, and distort the truely experienced past.
Also: the old windowpanes were small: a window is therefore made up of several small windows in rabbets. Thus, the video image 'clashes' during filming against the window frames. This I've translated to the images sliding back and forward over each other. The video image oppresses free retrospect, the memory is framed and limited. That's what context does with perception. The shoot and the editing has also framed time.
Photography and video is also a time machine in the sense that they record how it really was. At the same time, there is also interpretation: it was decided how the image is cropped, the image was shot at a specific time, with a certain light. The equipment 'interprets' the place that you capture and colors the memory. Thus are the records both objectively and subjective. Perception colors the memory.
I believe the Retrospective installationpiece touches on a particular aspect of human existence. The perception of time and place in the present is colored by the remembered time and place. The past is always present in the present of the human mind. But the past is present in a colored, fragmented, distorted way: framed by the present. A real-time video is impossible in the human mind: you remember moments, but you can't relive 'being' there, in the past. This experience touches on the tragedy of human existence: the awareness of the passing of time presses us on the finitude of our own existence, without ever making it imaginable.
- A life-size projection of a real-time video (1 hour) of a wall with a window in the former studio building New Rollecate, on a wall in the new studio building in Van Hetenstreet 59.
- The waiting room furniture with two seats and a magazine rack from the entrance hall of the former studio building New Rollecate, with mounted in the magazine rack a video in a loop of distorted views from the old windows of New Rollecate. This furniture is placed in the entrance hallway of the new studio building Van Hetentreet 59.
- Four photo-prints of areas in New Rollecate on aluminum, hung on the corresponding sites in the building at the Van Hetenstreet.
- An audio recording of the acoustics of New Rollecate taken in the entrance hall.
A bridge through time: from the new studio building to the place where the people who are working there, have worked before.
A rehousing means you leave your old place. The times you have spent there, how the light fell through the windows, the views, how it sounded and smelled, what that has done to you, who you've been there. You take your furniture and your stuff with you. These appear in a new space and a new environment. The same piece of furniture will be experienced anew and is yet familiar at your new place. Also you take yourself and your memories with you to your new place. Two times and places make contact.
The video in the magazine rack between the two chairs of the waitingroom furniture is shot through the old windows of my studio in New Rollecate. The glass is old, and therefore it is not as smooth and straight as modern glass. The images are distorted, if you move you see how the imperfections in the glass break your view. Looking back to the past, your memory is distorted: your memories are fragmentary, and distort the truely experienced past.
Also: the old windowpanes were small: a window is therefore made up of several small windows in rabbets. Thus, the video image 'clashes' during filming against the window frames. This I've translated to the images sliding back and forward over each other. The video image oppresses free retrospect, the memory is framed and limited. That's what context does with perception. The shoot and the editing has also framed time.
Photography and video is also a time machine in the sense that they record how it really was. At the same time, there is also interpretation: it was decided how the image is cropped, the image was shot at a specific time, with a certain light. The equipment 'interprets' the place that you capture and colors the memory. Thus are the records both objectively and subjective. Perception colors the memory.
I believe the Retrospective installationpiece touches on a particular aspect of human existence. The perception of time and place in the present is colored by the remembered time and place. The past is always present in the present of the human mind. But the past is present in a colored, fragmented, distorted way: framed by the present. A real-time video is impossible in the human mind: you remember moments, but you can't relive 'being' there, in the past. This experience touches on the tragedy of human existence: the awareness of the passing of time presses us on the finitude of our own existence, without ever making it imaginable.