Autor: Jul

Video, 10’48’’, 2006 (excerpt: 2′)

A roadmovie concert for splitscreens of four, each part showing extracts of a video-diary in a staggered way: present, past and future appear simultaneousley and side by side.

From the exploration of different fields of land- and city-scapes some essay-like collages present their subjects in an observing and personal style alike.

Just journey with them

The edge of the city

Eleg

Field recording

„Videoloopmachine“ is a tool to generate audiovisual compositions from video or film footage in realtime. It operates with transformative loops and an adjustable frameset for a splitscreen. It permits to create slowly changing rhythms and offers control over 4 different video channels. It can been used to make a poetical live composition about specific topics, areas, cities and contexts. I aim to play it like an instrument and also play it together with musicians like I did with Paul Michael von Ganski who mainly helped with the programming, too.

Some more sessions with this tool include the video concerts within a project on forms of travelling

(documented journeys in a remix)

Developing / 1st(2nd) phase:

It allows to explore older movie fotaage as the basis for timebased collages and compositions. The footage for the first and proposed project comes from an east german tv-series from the 1980’s and will also be presented where it was shot in Marzahn. The district in the outskirts of Berlin is famous for it’s highrisers, that once were the most modern and comfortable housings from the GDR.

„Videoloopmachine“ is suited to produce one-channel-videos with a split screen  of four in  audiovisual performances. (The programming of VLM was done by Michael Rieken)

Find two scetches of VLM here:

Since 2008, more than half of the world’s population is living in cities. The project „The edge of the city“ started 2004 as a cooperation with urbanist Wonne Ickx (Be/Mx) and became an audiovisual (re)search of the edges of Mexico City. We focussed on the people and their conditions of living there. The video combines different styles of storytelling, oscillates between documentary and essay.
It was the startingpoint for a series of works dealing with the idea of an endless cityscape.

The Edge of the City – text by Ruth Estévez

Stefan Demming’s artistic practice is a practice of travel. In his work he fosters the observation of daily scenarios to narrate different kind of human adventures. Throughout his voyages, the artist is recording with his video camera his appeal to moments and landscapes emphasizing concrete situations, which become in the very process of documentation independent and unique accounts.

By using maps and imaginary routes, Demming searches for places and spaces, where he sometimes takes their more obvious and literal function while other times he metaphorically alters their order, constructing adventures which give inner sense to what’s been previously recorded; it is this same sense that the traveler transforms his actions into epic poems regardless of the triviality of the facts exposed.

The exhibition entitled El límite de la ciudad (The Edge of the city) is based on the artist’s documentary with the same name, filmed in 2004 while visiting Mexico City. The video oscillates between document and fiction in order to narrate Demming‘s trip with urbanist Wonne Ickx, in search of the unpredictable limits of the metropolis.

From the start, there is no intention of revealing the actual limits of the city. Rather, the artist chooses to fantasize about the mysterious limits that appear to be never ending. This way all the research turns into a novel, moving towards a theme of the protagonists’ travels and adventures while at the same time revealing the conditions of survival based on the improvised reality that surrounds them.

To achieve the task, the artist becomes an ambiguous mixture between traveler and cartographer (a concept that may seem contradictory at first). The journey1 (something the cartographer doesn’t trust, even to the point of hating it) will be constructed from an imaginary relationship between the gaze and the landscape, camouflaged by the intention of finding the geographic demarcation of the city.
Throughout various interviews conducted in random encounters with strangers, the artist receives some kind of confirmation regarding the supposed limits of the city, which he then decides to disregard in an attempt to keep them unknown. Demming prefers to contemplate (in an almost Baudelaire-esque2 fashion) the urban horizon, marking a subtle difference between everyday functionality and the creation of myths.
It is through these excerpts that the exhibition reviews moments (personal anecdotes or stories told by others), spaces and daily activities that together reveal the possibility of urban boundaries.

Simulations, almost theatre sets- videographical or sculptural- which allow the optical illusion of the infinite, the structuring of the unimaginable and above all, the feeling of uncertainty and instability that comes with this changing geography.

Ruth Estévez

1 The notion of “a journey” is forged as one in the romantic sense of 19th century travelers, where the “real landscape” (perceived as something controlled and humanized) is replaced by the “sublime landscape”, which excites and provokes surprises or wonder.
2 Contrary to the first German Romantics where the poetic landscape was primarily constructed from nature, Baudelaire’s poetic landscape could have only been the city, the 19th century metropolis and its anonymity, its size and its misery.

documentary/essay

HD-video on BLU-RAY, 29’20’’, Pal, colour, stereo 2009
Language: Lowgerman, English, Pidgin; english subtitles

Sister Bernard Overkamp was a missionary sister in Papua New Guinea from 1968 until 1993. After 25 years she stopped her mission there because she thought the local sisters could do even good without her and she „didn’t want to be a hindrance for they cannot live their own culture.“
Since the year 2000 she and her colleague sister Dorothy are travelling with a circus in the USA. As an employee she takes care for the costumes of the female dancers. She and sister Dorothy want to be among the people and accompagny them. They call it a „ministry of presence“.

The video has been shown as a part of an installation project in public space: in camper that’s part of THE SMALLEST SHOW OF THE WORLD 2. By this, the story of the two nuns is brought back on the road and to the people.

– a hungarian rhapsody

HDV (transfered to Blu-ray), 8’17“, colour, stereo, 2012

The Budapest bathing culture is a rich cultural heritage. But while inside, there’s mainly tourists swimming, dissonant sounds from outside seem to disturb the flow of images …

On observing people’s bathing in different baths of the hungarian capital, a speech from the off is heard: Balázs Nagy Navarro talks on occasion of a hunger strike agains media manipulation in public media in december 2011.

The rhapsody as a poetic composition refers to the „good old times“ that seem to be preserved in the baths of Budapest. Many residents can’t afford regular visits of the Széchenyi or Gellért bath while Lukács is mainly frequented for curatorial reasons.
The recordings were made in 2009 and 2010 at different seasons. The idyllic image of the baths doesn’t seem to be more distorted by the modernization to wellness temples but by the changed political situation in the country.
Not only since the controverse media laws of Orbán’s government there’s international worries about the future of democratic freedom in the country.
Navarro and others protested against a singular case of manipulated reporting as well as the media policy of the rightwing Fidesz-government in general.
As a consequence of this protest Navarro, who was previously employed by the channel that he protested against, has been suspended from his work.
In his speech as well as in the sentimental goodbye-song at the end of the video the word „ELÉG“ is central: it is ENOUGH.

NOTES ON THE PRODUCTION:
The footage was shot in companionship with photographer Julia Baier (juliabaier.de) who’s focussed on public bathing culture. The video was finalized in 2012 in exchange with the hungarian activists Gabriella Csoszó (photographer) and Lídia Nádori (translator and musician).

Recorded at these baths of Budapest:
Széchenyi, Gellért, Lukács, Palatinus, Komjádi, 2009 – 2010

speech: Balázs Nagy Navarro
sound recording: Gabriella Csoszó (gabriellacsoszo.com)
translation: Éva Zádor (hungarian to german), Fabian Baier (german to english)

music:
„Reset“ by Barbara Morgenstern („Nichts muss“, Monika; barbaramorgenstern.de)
„Elmondanám“ by HANEM (hanemzenekar.com)

Thank you:
Balázs Nagy Navarro, Lídia Nádori, Gabriella Csoszó,
Julia Baier, Éva Karádi, Éva Zádor, Astrid Nippoldt, Fabian Baier,
the public baths of Budapest who gave permission for the shooting