...While the shade of a tree is being stolen away, bodiless organs sit in the enormous gaps of the drained earth. Under the constant noise of unseen machines, disjointed body parts touch the drying soil and breaths are only audible to insects. In this quiet, distorted world, old songs of goodwill are sung: “Future times of vain sorrow do not disturb our gentle sleep...” While we are waiting for the miracle to come the sand continues to fly.
ARTIST STATEMENT
VOID Film is based on a collective experiment a.o. in Welzow-Süd opencast mine in Lower Lusatia.We - a group of 17 people - spent ten days in this environment, trying to listen (bodily) to this special place in silence. Those in front of the camera express this connection through their mere, physical, vocal existence. The task behind the camera was not to intervene, to leave space for this Dasein.
Our focus in this journey revolves around the exploration of a receptive body and the cinematic translation of a physical/sonic world rooted in interactions among body/voice, matter, and nature. We aim to delve into the transmission of tactile, auditory, and corporeal sensibilities into a cinematic language.
The quest for a receptive body and the resultant acoustic space play a central role in "Void." We seek to investigate a specific approach to the body that isn't visually dominant but rather endeavors to experience the world with all senses on equal footing. To achieve this, we are exploring ways to render the body receptive and permeable to interactions with the surrounding space and the "Others" within that space. This entails a willingness to relinquish a controlled posture that only allows for what we already know and are familiar with. Instead, we aim to perceive the space around us as something containing unfamiliar, foreign information and to be receptive to it. This approach is accompanied by the notion that the space surrounding me existed before me and will continue to exist after me. This allows for a physical approach to space that doesn't solely result from my own perspective and therefore is capable of opening up an interstice for other perspectives. The resulting shift in perspective, one could say decentering, is fundamentally linked to a political vision of coexistence in which humanity does not position itself as the dominant focal point but seeks to understand the world from the perspective of "Others." We believe that we need a view beyond ourselves in order to confront the consequences of our actions.
In contemporary Western perception, humans are placed at the center of all things. The "non-human" is often relegated to the background and/or seen as existing solely to serve human needs or be used by humans.
In VOID, we aim to challenge this tendency. At its core, the project is an artistic exploration of an anti-anthropocentric perspective and its cinematic translation. Instead of placing the subject in the center of attention as an “identity”, the body itself transforms into a landscape and the landscape becomes the protagonist. When the body decenters itself, with the organ of sight becoming the center of the body; the body transforms into a landscape…
VOID addresses one of the dark insights of a possible future that we all know but are afraid to talk about.
