Diagonale, an annual film festival held in Vienna…
Brigitta Boedenauer: Architecture, Space and (E)motion
By Andr�s Ram�rez Gaviria
After presenting her film, don’t touch me when I start to feel safe/waltz nuevo no.1, in the
Diagonale, an annual film festival held in Vienna, and winning first prize under the category Experimental Film, Brigitta Boedenauer is developing a series of films under the title Mnemosyne, which take the concept of memory as a central theme. As in her previous filmic endeavors, Boedenauer partakes of diverse areas of research and expression, dynamically engaging in the fields of film, photography, art and architecture.
The development for the films begins with a number of visits to specifically selected buildings whose interiors are photographed by the artist.
The architecture of the buildings functions as a set where the artist strolls through collecting the pictures that unfold before her. Taking cue from Montage and Architecture, an essay written by Sergei Einsenstein in the late 1930s, the photographic images selected from each of the locations are always assembled “from the point of view of a moving spectator.” The architecture is mapped within the context of a dweller or traveler and, as a result, the photographic material that remains from the artist’s visits generates its own architectural promenade from the changing and surprising perspectives captured.
This collection of images is laid out systematically as source material from which a non-linear montage, using video and sound editing software, is constructed. Each image is subjectively linked on the screen without following the prearranged order of the photographic layout. The juxtaposition is not in accordance with the photographic archive – which in itself is already an abstracted fabrication – but designed intuitively, following an emotive response to the material in a way that bespeaks the structures of an idiosyncratic memory.
The final effect of the films is a non-sequential display of abstracted sites and sounds that attempts to subjectively transgress the ideas of memory and place.
The concept of memory, which stands as the primary theme of the project, is not thought of as a fixed set of recorded data immune to the distorting effects of interpretation. Memory is analyzed as a subjective reconstruction of information always in flux and defined by the changing moods of the narrator.
The project for Boedenauer does not constitute an accurate remembrance of places once visited. Through the mechanisms of montage, the images that served to chronicle the sequential traversing of space, namely the interior of the buildings, are refashioned in a disposition that does not pay attention to the narrative logic of space and time. The footage is deconstructed and decontextualized from the original archive, not unlike stories passed from narrator to narrator. The main purpose is, therefore, to present a dynamic visualization of memory as a subjective interpretation that bypasses the dialectic of a linear description.
The concept of a subjective or non-linear, as opposed to linear construction, can be equated here with some of the developments in new media technologies and theories of post-structural philosophy, specifically the idea of the rhizome by Deleuze and Guatarri.
Developed together by the French thinkers, but equally popular and crucial for hypertext theorists, the idea of the rhizome states that information systems are not centralized but dispersed. “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be,” Deleuze/Guatarri has instructed. Circumstances are not organized in order, according to a set of values that hierarchically expands from the center to the margins, but “linked” together in a decentralized network of nodes and threads.
The artistic process of the project in question undergoes a set of changes that span from construction, to deconstruction, to reconstruction. The raw material is repeatedly refined through all these stages and what emerges is a set of nodes linked together by the effects of video processing. Each node (image/sound) does not hold a hierarchical position with respect to the next, but coalesces with the rest in a single network represented as an energetic, animated sequence of visuals and sounds.
The idea of a spectator moving through space collecting visual information is the starting
point of the project. The deformations that this collection is subjected to is the center inquiry the project puts forward. The artists asks: In her presentation, what is the selective criteria of the narrator? What is the byproduct that arises from this interpretation?
As exemplified in Mnemosyne 01, the evolution from collection, to process, to represent is the result of a subjective and emotive interpretation. The intersection between these categories serves as proof of the disassociative nature between being and representing that rests at the core of any mediated experience.
