This film centers on a very special form of street construction, in a very literal sense. A type of space ship of concrete, an underpass created below a rotunda, is the silent backdrop that serves as the nighttime entry into the film. The futuristic construction is traveled for 22 seconds before the title of the work – A to A (Kreis Wr.Neustadt) – appears and thus begins the rattle of the motor that accompanies the rest of the film: from his Vespa, Johann Lurf documents around 100 rotunda islands in Lower Austria, shown in increasingly grotesque segments of only a few seconds – and thus creates something of a catalogue of local building malfunctions. The center islands that he shows feature gravel, decorative hedges, or stone sculptures with grapevines, fountains, or ornamental flower bulbs, and are furnished with traffic signs, information postings, or advertisement objects.
A to A is thereby not only a study of the islands themselves, but above all, of the terror of the mundane, of everyday architectural horrors, which one can count on seeing in the field of traffic islands. The industrial areas of eastern Austria are disfigured by electrical poles, building cranes, and suburban residential blocks appear exchangeable and all of the discount furniture stores, gas stations and junk-food restaurants, the supermarkets and building supply stores seem like the unchanging set of a ghostly provincial staging. The monotony of the rotunda suggests here a commentary on the emptiness of Austrian real-scenery, punctuated only by the piping of the Vespa, which produces diverse whining, high-pitched motor sounds through the changing of gears, as if even the vehicle itself was lamenting the views that it is exposed to. The 3-D version, which provides an alternative way to admire A to A, incidentally also gives even more plastic impressions of Austrian architectural pragmatism.
(Stefan Grissemann)