Dancer: Dominik Feistmantl
Memento
Category: Video Art
Brother of Sleep
“Come,O death, you brother of sleep,
come and lead me away from here;
release my little ship’s rudder,
bring me to a safe harbour!”
from: Johann Sebastian Bach Kreuzstabkantate, BWV56
Wailing Song
Countless small will-o’-the-wisps buzz in this artificial underwater world. They symbolise all the people who drowned between 2014 and 2022 on their flight to Europe. At the bottom of this sea, we listen to the stories of five young refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Gambia. They talk about their families, their flight from violence, their hopes and dreams.
The audio material was made available with the kind permission of the Junges Theater Augsburg.
Odyssee
The beauty of life and its antropogenic death.
Mantra
2022, video with sound, animation, 4:45 min
The Fitting
Old photographs in a family album strangely come to life. These are my eyes. I “slip” into my mother like into a piece of clothing, then into my father, my brother, my grandmother, and so on. How does it feel to bring the dead back to life?
They are all people with whom I was connected and whose story I am continuing as a “descendant”. Who am I and what have they made of me? Does a part of them live on in me?
Patterns
Nature is determined by chaos as the driving force that leads to order. The strongest form of order is a pattern or rhythm.
2016, Videoinstallation, 9:50 min
“After all, rhythm is the repeated pattern itself – the code and the looping. And we all dance to that. We dance to a choreography that is pre-programmed into the interface. This choreography has power: it is the planned moves of control.(…) But really we are just making the same old moves that everyone else on the dance floor is pushing out of their (seemingly) free flowing limbs. We dance, and we are part of the choreography of control.” Renee Carmichael/ fleeimmediately.com
Part one – Patterns
Patterns are regularly recurring structures generated from modules in predefined order and repetition. As individuals and social beings we are naturally influenced by patterns: heartbeat and breath have a rhythm (auditory pattern). The genetic code resembles a pattern. Metabolism is determined by “patterns”: Nutrient absorption, transport, transformation and excretion – as well as the course of nature: spring, summer, autumn and winter – birth, growth, reproduction and death. We surround ourselves with patterns: wallpaper, patterned textiles, music, dance, customs, behaviour. Patterns give us security because they are predictable.
Part two – the machinery
Patterns also help individuals to fit harmoniously into society and contribute to its success. This fact makes us similar to machines. These work because drives and gears follow certain patterns and thus keep the machinery moving.
Part Three – Perpetual Motion
We are part of a system made up of individuals who function according to patterns. If one part fails, it is replaced by another working element – a principle that keeps a system in constant motion.
Dancer: Alessandra La Bella, Jennifer Ruof, Silvana Lemm, Therese Madeleine Thonfors, Natalie Farkas
Garden of Eden
We are the narrative of our own memories and others’ memories of us. This work is about home as utopia, about childhood as a lost paradise, and about identity that is fed by stories.
Here we are, sitting at the dining table of my childhood, listening to my father’s memories. A very intimate moment that will last forever.
Hänsel
In this work, the viewer finds himself in an oppressive situation of disorientation, unease and foreboding. He is left in the dark about the protagonist, his motivation for his actions and his relationship to the room. At the same time, he is given an uncomfortable proximity to the events that he cannot escape. Children’s hands, breadcrumbs, fire and dead insects make reference to Grimm’s fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”.
Return to Paradise
Besides the biblical paradise, there are many “paradises”: childhood or home, for example, are places of longing that are more temporal than spatial. The only way to return to these paradises is to remember. However, the process of remembering is subject to various disturbances. I compare this process to the search for the right radio station, which is disturbed by superimposed frequencies or static noises. Similarly, memory is not always accessible. Often there are only vague images that require a high degree of interpretation.
