OFF 1999
series of six digital photographs
No movie exists for this plot: A desert in front of a hillside that glows in the dark or maybe explodes. Two headlights that illuminate a rutty country road. “Dancing,” empty promise not kept during a night which does not know time. No one is there. The story deleted, the narrative halted, the characters gone. An omission in the sequence of images, a blank spot, one of those moments where the voices disperse, and the cold comfort of endings and beginnings subsides.
The end of the movie is the beginning of a new story, the conflict unresolved, the landscape savaged. This couple which no one really recalls anymore passed through all those scenes and has now finally disappeared. Or perhaps it is the other way round: the scene has disappeared inside of the couple, exterior thus becoming interior.
Those fictitious buildings refer to films and other media narratives in an attempt to short-circuit those, displaying artificial nature as well as the artificiality of nature. The staging is constructed as a conflicting constellation of spaces and fields which border on something unnamed, on an off space, always on the verge of disappearance. They nevertheless are restored inside of a different story: a story of journeys, love, and transformations.
Movements, moments, catastrophes, separations, surprises take place in an off-space that never becomes visible. Nevertheless, it defines the frame of the narrative. Where do the characters go when they leave the camera frame? The end of the movie is just the beginning of desire – desire for endlessness, but the beginning of the end as well (of the end of love, for example.) Godard asks, Qu´est-ce que c´est, une catastrophe? La prémiere strophe d´un poème d´amour. The work tells of those catastrophes as well. Shelters, huts, places that do not protect anything or anyone. They originate in the history of a repression, in a psychological Off. The subject of the work is the tale of the locations, the location as character. Here begins or ends the space which drives itself towards emptiness.
This work refers to the following films: Badlands (Terence Malick, USA 1973) / Je t’aime moi non plus (Serge Gainsbourgh, F 1976) / Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, I 1968) / Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, USA 1955) / Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, I 1964).