The seen walls of lost Eden
Video (loop) 2006 4.34 min.
Lost like an exiled the black figure of an old man (represented by the artist herself) wanders down a deserted motorway into “the night of advance and development”, locked out of “the lost Eden”, in between the red earthy ravines, which appear like wounds carved into the landscape. The camera perspective alternates between one of sovereignty, an almost birds eye view of the motorway, which gives the forlorn, misplaced human figure an almost tragicomic appearance, and another following the subjectivity of the stumbling individual. The sound reinforces the difference even further: a wind silently blows as we see the figure struggling beneath us, when we follow, the loud sound of passing cars appears to show the invisible, as imagined by the protagonist. The protagonist could be taken from a Beckett drama (e.g. ”Endgame”), but also derives from the Victorian figure of the art and social critic John Ruskin, as an already old man. His sentence about “the seen walls of lost Eden” closes the video into a loop. John Ruskin was in some way the lonesome fighter against the negative influences of the industrialisation, which in his opinion brought upon a loss of human individuality in mass production and an alienation from nature and a ruthless exploitation of natural resources. Nature, landscape and its identity become emblematic with the lost Eden. But the idea of a lost Eden is also ambivalent and the difficulties to deal with the loss of values that are transient, includes a kind of escapism as well.
ursula blickle videoarchiv, kunsthalle wien
Medienwerkstatt Wien, Video Edition Austria release 02/2008