Is it, in view of the global and permanent availability of information of any
kind, still possible or indeed more necessary than ever to withdraw into
oneself?
Usually travellers take holiday photos back home from their journeys. In this
project the audience is confronted with impressions of the flats of the twelve
musicians, who travelled there from the whole of Europe, filmed and cut by the
composer. Ordinary things like tables and chairs, handles of doors and windows,
water taps and sinks are arranged within an aesthetic context. Routine domestic
tasks like washing one’s hands, slicing and spreading bread, doing the dishes
and hoovering are made rhythmic and musical. Lights, doors and windows reveal
their metaphysical qualities. The flat’s specific aura is questioned with regard
to the design’s history, with concentration on the individual characteristics as
well as those typical for the respective nation. The variety and the common
grounds of European (residential) culture can be heard and seen with exemplary
clarity within this microcosm: in hard cuts, extremely subjectively exposed. It
is not given away, though, who lives where.
Is there really such a thing as the Greek carpet, the French wardrobe, the Dutch
window, the Swedish table, the British WC, the German chair, the Spanish lamp,
the Polish duvet, the Italian kitchen … ?
From time to time a crucial character shows up in the video, the eternal visitor
of her widely branched progeny the first mother of the continent, the
mythological figure with her migration background: Europa. Presented by a
Turkish actress, she sets (like every home-visitor) the tone, draws attention to
herself, and decides what is to be done. She visits unexpectedly and tells once
more her well-known legends (Homer, Ovid, Heiner Müller …) – with a divergent
variety of interpretations between violent abduction, opera-like performance and
hedonistic seduction.
Typically she acts rather strangely, but also disappears again – a classical
foreign body (or alien element).
The three films are simultaneously projected on three screens positioned before
the audience on the left, in the center and on the right.
The musicians are stationed as three nearly identical quartets (woodwind
instruments and strings as well as trombone and percussion) between the screens
and - like a fourth wall – behind the audience.
The compositon of this chamber music is very intimate in character as a result
of the intense form of preliminary analysis and a mutual exchange of ideas. The
live music absorbs, varies and contrasts with the structured, rather private
sounds of the original Video soundtrack composed of the clattering of
kitchenware, the roaring and splashing of water taps, showers and toilets, the
shoving of chairs and the slamming of doors to the polyphonic concert of bells
and rings.
The flat itself sings, moans and dances.
Cross-border flat viewing from unusual perspectives.
A musical Home-video: A triptychon of usual European everyday life.
mp4 - 69
MB for quicktime
