TRAILER.PARK

HD video, 28 min., 2012

In collaboration with Constanze Ruhm

The work was conceived specifically for Galerie der Stadt Schwaz and curated by Eva Maria Stadler (jun – aug 2012)

The love story of Hans and Anna. 20 years after their separation, they meet again. He is a film director, she an actress.

The filmic installation TRAILER.PARK was shot in a - now abandoned - military training ground for Soviet tank troops in former East Germany. There, a number of characters meet who have died already several times. Undead, revenants, and zombies are returning to be staged as characters that move from story to story, from one film to the next. As always, it's the conditions and conventions of cinema, love and work at the same time that are at stake: on the level of narrative, of staging, as well as in the configuration of the installation space.

 

Like cats, Hans and Anna have several lives. He (possibly, Jean-Luc Godard), and she (possibly, Anna Karina) are rendered as icons of cinema history. At the same time, their love story and their working relation are negotiated in the exhibitions production space, thus rendering visible all mutual dependencies at the same time.

Film history as well as film histories are worked through in order to finally reach "the cold heart of narration", to unmoor what is finally left of it. Film here is understood as a form of production, which re-writes itself continuously through imagination and reference as well as through omissions and blanks. Death always operates as a dramaturgic device for the stories' resolution, which can thereby return once more to a new beginning. Trapped in this loop, characters die in order to reunite in different places, at different times and in different versions and constellations.

Film has an ontological dimension, says Gilles Deleuze in his profound analysis of filmic techniques, methodologies and operations in the two seminal volumes The Movement Image and The Time Image. In this oeuvre, Deleuze creates a terminology, which renders films as a discursive form that forms and influences decisive political constellations of work, love and life.

In TRAILER.PARK, one central character is a donkey. This is a reference to the masterpiece Au Hazard Balthazar by Robert Bresson (1966), in which Balthazar the donkey is loved and flayed at the same time. It is Balthazar who reappears in TRAILER.PARK - he as well being an icon of cinema. Like the films' three human characters, this donkey fell out of history in order to re-appear in the former training grounds' wasteland. In this barren place, which, as the story claims, once should have become a camping site, it is not only these characters, human and animal, who live, die and return, but also: their stories.

 

Text: Eva Maria Stadler