KATYA SANDER AND ALEX VILLAR’S TEMPORARY OCCUPATIONS AND BOTH SIDES NOW AT HALLE FUR KUNST, LUNEBURG, 2001
Curated by Heike Munder and Andrea Kroksness
KATYA SANDER AND ALEX VILLAR’S TEMPORARY OCCUPATIONS AND BOTH SIDES NOW AT HALLE FUR KUNST, LUNEBURG, 2001 Credits
halle_für_kunst Lüneburg e.V.
English to German translation: Bettina Steinbrügge Audio to text transcription: Marta Fronc-Villar Photo documentation: Hans-Jürgen Wege Printing:Vier-Türme TmbH Benedict Press, Münsterschwarzach Abtei Edition: 700 Edited by: halle_für_kunst Lüneburg e.V. Postfach 2128, 21311 Lüneburg Telephone/fax: +49 (0)4131/40 20 01 hfk@lueneburg.net www.halle-fuer-kunst.de Publisher: Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst Jacobystrasse 28, D – 60385 Frankfurt am Main Telephone: +49 (0)69/44 63 62 Fax: +49 (0)69/94 41 24 51 revolver@naiv.de www.naiv.de ISBN: 0000000000000000 ©halle_für_kunst Lüneburg e.V. and Katya Sander and Alex Villar Thanks to Nanna Buhl and Sharon Doyle DCA–Danish Contemporary Art Foundation
Bettina Steinbrügge, Director
The moment one crosses a threshold can also be the moment of a temporary rupture between subject and regulating codes. A slight misalignment might occur at this junction that can be the pivot of a new experience for the subject. I was once presented with a question that I think relates to this discussion: Why is the camera view in my videos so fixed? Why not make use of different off-centered angles to mirror the spatial situations I depict? I understand the question, but I feel that this plea for cinematic mimicry is misplaced in relation to this particular work. I very deliberately wanted the projected image to be mapped onto the surfaces of the exhibition space. This understanding of the screen as a physically present surface in the space speaks against the cinema’s requirement that the viewer suspend her/his disbelief. Instead, I ask the viewers to enter the work while bringing along the physicality of their bodies. Katya Sander: I agree with you there. It would be ridiculous to try to mimic a space on the screen when the space we want to talk about is the actual space, the space – so to speak – surrounding the screen… In that sense we are both very much using the projection (the screen) more as a wall; a spatial element, than as a virtual, filmic space. Trying to "narrate" a space on the screen with all kinds of vivid and spectacular angles and shots would only further the distance between the virtual space in the projection and the real space and body of the spectator. As you say, this is like what classical cinema is doing; trying to make the spectator forget her own body and instead identify with that of the protagonist. I think that it’s very important that the walls and the architectural elements symbolically become aligned with the screen that you project them onto. The screen is a wall, and one has to
understand the parallel, the metaphor; it is a wall, but also an image; an image or symbol or metaphor for ownership, territorialization, borders… and so on. I find this possible gliding important. Alex Villar: Yes. The screen in these pieces is both a surface for the projection and the very boundary that separates the spaces. There is a tension between the virtuality of the projected image and the actuality of the support. I don’t think that this is a tension that we want to resolve. I believe we want the viewer to be precisely there, suspended between these two realms, potentially open for shifts in perception. Katya Sander: Yes indeed, the tension... In the beginning of this conversation you noted that we both have some kind of door openings one can pass through. Why these openings or passageways? Well, I wanted people to move, and I wanted them to have to move from one spatial definition to another: I wanted to address their desire to investigate, to look around the corners, to be curious of what’s on the other side. Also, I wanted the screen to have two sides because, in fact, when projected onto, the two sides can be seen through each other. Thus, the screen sometimes becomes almost transparent (you can see both images – both sides – at the same time) but at the same time much more solid and physical (it become apparent that there is "another side"). The screen is the axis around which everything else happens. You mentioned yourself that the possibility of "trespassing" underlines the fact that people are taking action in relation to the set-up, instead of "just looking at it". Another effect I wanted to obtain by having a door in the screen, was that there might be someone on the other side of the screen who
shadows / blocks the view to the images or texts you are looking at from your side. All of a sudden you don’t know which shadows are from real people and which are images. Thus, while most of the shadows are still- images, one or two of them might suddenly move because they actually belong to somebody on the other side of the screen. For me this subtle mix of "real" shadows and images of shadows furthers the point of aligning the body and the image in a very physical way: when watching, people do mistake the one for the other, and it is actually quite funny to experience... Alex Villar: I like that two-sided aspect. Something similar happened in my piece. I think that having two sides, a ‘front and back’, plays off people’s desire to see what is behind the screen. To see the apparatus that creates the ‘spectacle.’ The pieces don’t exactly frustrate this desire, but offer something else in return: they show the flipside of the same situation. There is repetition and there is difference. Katya Sander: Yeah, well it’s funny you say that. I was just thinking of the mirror, the mirror that you used for your projection, and the "two sides"… It makes me think of the aspect of reading again: I had put text slides once in a while between the many images of shadows. The texts were always backprojected/projected mirrored – Meaning that you could always see them right and read them from the other side, through the screen. In order to read a text you would thus have to be on the opposite side of the wall/screen, and the text that you’re trying to read (written in white on dark) is always most clear when falling on a dark surface. Thus, your own shadow would facilitate your reading, but obstruct the reading for people on the other side, and vice-
versa. In that sense, the moment there is one person on each side, you have to be aware of where the other person is… The text- slides where short fragments of dialogues, direct speech, between two people; and "I" and a "you". They seemed to talk about issues of seeing and being seen, desiring, projecting, wishing, avoiding… just simple fragments of sentences. Alex Villar: This is very interesting because it creates the possibility for intersubjective experiences to take place. It involves collective engagement. I just thought of the doors again… I think that what is particularly relevant about doors—in whatever form they take—is that a door can be both a boundary and a means of passage. While the space contains and the walls divide, the door negotiates. A door presents a possibility; it invites one to move through. The moment someone crosses the door, something happens. I remember some childhood stories about the treasures one would attain once a particular threshold was crossed. Whether or not there is a gift on the other side of the door, the promise can take one there. Aside from the mental images involved in passing through the door, there is a very physical sensation that corresponds to the experience of leaving one space and entering another. There is also a possible difference in economic status involved in the crossing. In the series of clips that comprise my video, a person is trying to run in a straight line on the sidewalk, ignoring all sorts of boundaries. There is a sequence to it; the person in the video starts by solely refusing to be pushed into the available public areas. As the video goes on, this person begins to cross more sensitive boundaries and, at the end, trespass private property. The character of the actions in the video changes from ‘aloof disregard’ to unwritten rules to ‘material trespassing.’ More or less inadver-
tently, in the continuous process of crossing different thresholds, the subject in the video undergoes a transformation. In the physical structure in the exhibition space, the viewer is presented with the possibility of experiencing a similar transformation, at least potentially. Katya Sander: We could see the figure in your video as someone who doesn’t know the codes and just wants to move from A to B and thus has to climb a lot. In that sense you communicate to the spectator, to us who see it, that the ways in which these spaces supply placement and meaning to the body – how they either exclude or include – is through the employment of cultural and social signs within architecture. It’s a coding; it’s a socialization. I am very interested in this understanding of spaces as both inhabited, used and socialised by us, but also the other way around: framing, socializing and addressing us. I would like to suggest a parallel between language and space in the sense that language could be explained as something that speaks; speaks through you. And speaking involves addressing and being addressed in different ways – it means that you understand yourself in different ways depending on how you’re being addressed and inscribed in language. I see a link here with the text slides, the fragments of dialogues, because they center around with this idea of address: They all involve a "I" and a "you", and places you in a circuit of recognition. Only neither the "I" nor the "you" is clear. All the modes of address are related to you, your reading, your presence, your body and relations to what you see or cannot see, but the relationship is blurred and it's purpose unclear. Unrecognizable, perhaps, even though the pronouns themselves are recognizable. An uncertainty about object and subject positions that perhaps is not too dissimilar to the rela-
tionship you have to the figure in your videos. Alex Villar: As you were speaking, an image formed in my mind. When you first described how the subject is produced through the various spaces it inhabits, I thought about the piece you did with the two doors in a museum. Each had a label that assigned a gender to the door. Crossing those doors under the label became a charged experience: Either you match or you don’t. For the piece in Lüneburg, you projected bits of texts on the wall, the very language that shapes the subject—and the shadow itself is also a shape. You created a very physical intervention and projected on it shadows that are not only representations of the body but are also indexical of the body. Written language and the phenomenology of space seem to have been there all along in your work.