Hedda Schattanik & Roman Szczesny
Light-field Memories: Torso
2021
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Copyright the artists; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Single-channel light field display, 8K light field video, stereo sound, 15min 1s, loop
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Light-field Memories: Torso is a looped 3-D Sequence of images and animations exclusively produced for a light-field monitor which emits pixels with directionality to them, resulting in an auto-stereoscopic image that the viewer is allowed to wander about on the horizontal axis.
Body parts and objects connect seemingly unrelated settings through their reappearances. It is a dreamlike stream of memories and associations of an anonymous person.
A poem - an abbreviated version of Rilke's "Archaischer Torso Apollos" - is floating in the air. In the original, Rilke celebrates the sculptural self-assertion of the active human body through the very absence of bodily attributes that guarantee the ability to move. It is the body's fragmentation that opens up our imagination.
In the Light-field Memories, though, this idea merges with the flip coin of the imaginative: the literal interpretation, thus the dissected, desolate body. The intimate area between two spread legs, settled on an artificial landscape and covered by the complaint: "The work you assigned me to, made me so sick, that I lost all my hair in yesterday's storm." - seem to build a loose link to Duchamp's quote of the black dahlia murder in 1947 in his work "Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The illuminating gas...". Yet each scene merges with more than one element of possible narration or reference. Not only do we see this very private part of the body, but also a miniature of a face on the right side of one leg and an abstract object that reminds us of gestures of action painting on the other.
In the black dahlia case, the horrific erosion comes from the hands of a murderer. In this work, a troubled relation to nature seems to confront a fragmented being in different ways, scattered throughout the scenes: A creature twirls unnaturally in a fire, little figures reminiscent of Pompeji's lava victims restate the shock of the loss of control over their reality. A projection of an atomic explosion flickers onto a women's face. Rilke's poem ends with the conclusion "Du musst dein Leben ändern" - "You have to change your life." Yet, in this poem's version, this part is blurred and almost impossible to read. The body, we can perceive in this extraordinarily sculptural displacement, is in its individuality or loneliness trapped and immobile. Yet, in it's overlaps of seemingly different personas, that represent different mediums (computergenerated, handmade, flesh) it seems to be open for change. It does not move, but is moved by the viewer, who activates the scenes with a gentle shift of perspective from one side to the other.
