II Trienal de Luanda 2010

Video (excerpt: 0:26 of 04:10);
Single channel video, 4'10'', sound, b/w.
Life-size projection on ceiling.
Vienna, Austria


Shadows of bodies are filmed from below a tightly stretched, white elastic surface (aesthet-
ically comparable to filming under the ice cover-
ing a frozen lake). The bodies jump, fall and move around, with different emotions. The film is screened on the ceiling of the exhibition space, so that the visitor has the impression of being himself below the surface, as if in the underworld or Hades, seeing the shadows of the World above or seeing our ancestors' shadows.

The Forefathers is a collective term for all people, male or female, from which a person is descended. In the popular faith, the Ancestress of a lineage also fall into mind with a ground-breaking, protective function; in the legend the Ancestres appears as a ghost in old castles. In mythology, shades often represent the inhabi-
tants of the netherworld: in this project, they are a metaphor for the Forefathers and the hereafter.

Only in movement, as painful as it may be,
is life – based on the memoirs of my grand-
father – a work cycle about history, migration, loss and the passing of time occurred. The work draws traces of memory, of succeeding, and of failure, loss and vulnerability, of life and death, of human existence in its emotional diversity.
It is the attempt to compose through a con-
scious, fragment memory a new image in order to inspire the public’s own associations and memories.

A choreography of shadows, a sensual, ephem-
eral experience of light and movement. The sound is composed by (underwater) breathing and wind. Breath as a metaphor for the soul: the soul of breath that many cultures believe is the place of the life force, and the soul of every human being.

In the triptych I produced for the II Trienal
de Luanda, this artwork refers to the element
of air.

Acknowledgements
Choreography, performer:
Caroline Decker
Performers:
Heidi Neumayer,
Tobias M. Traeger
Safety engineering:
Udo Kirchmayer
Rope work and lighting:
Andrea Korosec