Marcellvs L.
»1716«, 2008/2009
MiniDV transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 7:17 Min.
Courtesy the artist and carlier|gebauer, Berlin
This work has been realised as a result of Videobrasil/WBK Vrije Academie Award and the support of the WBK Vrije Academie/World Wide Visual Factory (Artist in Residence Program).
Invited by Jochen Volz (Artistic director, INHOTIM, Belo Horizonte/ Brasilien)
Since 2002 Marcellvs L. has been working on a continuous sequence of videos he calls Video-Rhizomas. As far as their content goes, the individual works haven’t any direct or narrative context in common. They should rather be seen as discontinuous fragments relating, in very much their own way, small events – thereby investigating with great precision our perception of time and how long that perception lasts. The individual videos from the sequence are labelled only with numbers, which do not either give any clue at all as to their place of origin or suggest any kind of chronology. Video-Rhizoma »1716« shows the exciting climax of a storm tide. Extreme gusts are hurling waves against a rocky foreshore, ocean spray fills the image. A figure appears, struggling ponderously against the powers of nature. The effort involved is directly transmitted to the camera work and the sound recording. Exposed to the same storm, the camera constantly appears on the verge of slipping and the microphone is hopelessly overloaded. The observer’s attempt at following the event appears mirrored, very directly, in the existential instability of the video recording.
Text: Jochen Volz
Website of the artist: http://www.caosmos.org
