Evidence

EVIDENCE shows clips from a virtual scenery which began in OFF, a barren place in a deserted nighttime landscape, where architectures emerge from reconstructions of collective memories. EVIDENCE is a phoney locale, consisting of a constellation of architectures and buildings, reconstructions of fictitious locations and images from media memory, from accidental arrangements that belong to the realm of constructed imaginations. It is no place to visit.

EVIDENCE could be the name of a place, as in Evidence, CA., somewhere in the world in a game of reflections and refractions adding another layer of reality to the expression – as if one could actually travel there. EVIDENCE promises paradise, it conjures up a disenchanted utopia, it mirrors its own formation – it is not more than that which becomes visible, and ultimately only a proof for the fact that something is there to be seen: a silent witness to itself. No other life is being touched here.

EVIDENCE could be a film set or a matte painting displaying the following architectures as virtual reconstructions: A snack stand (from Je t'aime... moi non plus by Serge Gainsbourg, F 1975), a cabin  (in Lincoln/Montana, inhabited by the ill-famed UNA-bomber Ted Kaczinsky), a movie theater (from a photograph by Julius Shulman, Terrace Theater Los Angeles 1938), a hangar (a storage belonging to the FBI where Kaczinsky's hut is still being stored as evidence), a stage (from Badlands by Terence Malick, USA 1973), a beach house (from Kiss Me Deadly by Robert Aldrich, USA 1955). These movie sets and backdrops are arranged in a landscape which has not been overtaken by sudden nightfall, but which radiates artificial darkness generated by the complete absence of light. 

EVIDENCE is the set of a film which will never be shot, because no story wants to be told, and no actors are there to perform. There is only the tale of an absence: Abandoned cabins, empty stands, dilapidated hangars, and dusty roads in the desert under a starless night. Architecture itself becomes the lead and reflects a reality, which originates in the transformation of stories into places, moments and gestures, to generate ever new fictions: A rendez-vous of narrative forms and fictions based on the grammar of collective fantasies. EVIDENCE secures the evidence of human traces for unknown purposes – these traces and remainders become the subject of radical speculations.

The view of Kaczinsky's silent dwelling is cast in the light of a neon sign which promises fiction, but only to convert it into reality. The cabin: A place of hiding and escapism, of hermitage, of secret liaisons (from Thoreau's Walden to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly), a projection surface for romantic deliriums of those who flee civilisation to live at the margins of the world.

A viewer who throws but a quick glance might read "terror" instead of "terrace" – a reading error thus conjures up the truth of the image, intention of a visual staging, which unfolds as transparent substance on the image's surface. A shape is being occupied by language, and language itself short-circuits to disappear inside the form. Original attractions are obliterated. Instead, another reality is announced: Terror. The films, whose titles can be deciphered on the original photo by Shulman, are second-range oeuvres: Bahama Passage (Edward H. Griffith, USA 1941); It started with Eve (Henry Koster, USA 1941). They had just been released when the picture was taken. Today they are nowhere to be seen anymore. It is strange to notice that the photo credits date to the year 1938, however the films were not screened before 1941.

EVIDENCE is not a panorama, but rather a constellation in a desert which refers to the one in Pasolini's Teorema, but which also recalls the deserts of David Lynch's Dune and Bunuel's Simon del Desierto – there might also be some notion of Touch of Evil by Orson Welles (USA 1958), as well as a trace of the subterranean cave system of Franz Kafka's tale Der Bau.

"Who understands a desert?" asks Deleuze. The scenic view ("terrace") turns into the fright of the sight or the circumstance ("terror"). Evidence always serves the wrong party, and occasionally it happens to just disappear. Thus, there is no real proof to the story.