I Gestures
‘The starting points for my works are always images that I collect. These images can also be thoughts, things that I saw, stories, readings, etc. Everything starts from this kind of heterogeneous archive. I then add a succession of filters: drawings, then wall drawings, and, at the end, there are the films. This archive also functions as a collection of gestures that come from completely different contexts. My last film, entitled 8 (2007), depicts, for example, a variety of positions: a woman is looking through a window; a man is holding a Möbius strip in his hands; another man is doing the French mon œil, a gesture that suggests dubiousness; another posture refers to a Greek muse, etc. All these gestures come from different fields and different centuries; it’s like a collage. But even if there are no connections between them, they are gathered in one single narrative. In this way, the idea of coincidence plays an important role in my work. In automatic writing, everything that comes out makes sense; my works attempt to demonstrate that, in the end, everything always makes sense, whatever the timeline is.’
‘This tension primarily takes place in the viewer’s perception, between the photographic image and the work’s temporality, which is visible through these un-controlled movements. By extending one moment in time, the idea is to keep and develop this tension. It actually echoes the early times of photography, when to take a photograph was to create a tableau vivant: because of the photographic plates’ low sensibility, people had to pose for fifteen or twenty minutes. These works are also characterised by a tension between control – the scene being precisely staged – and non-control, through all these coincidences that escape the staging, enabling the work to remain open.’
II Stage
‘I am interested in the theatre as a construction. For example, Karo Sieben takes as point of departure an element present in the baroque theatre’s architecture: the fact that everything was organised around a single perspective, the one of the sovereign, who was always seated at the same place. All the scenes were staged from his point of view, so that, in the other parts of the architecture, you had these distorted perspectives. As you said, another key element is the straight line between audience and stage. This line is materialised by the curtain: when the curtain is closed, there is no theatre; when it opens, there is theatre. The curtain marks a beginning and an end; it defines a very precise temporality. This is a very important aspect, especially for my performances. Theatre is ephemeral, and I’m interested in things that do not last. This line is also linked to the notion of mimesis. The performance that I recently presented at Tate Modern features a group of characters around a man who is about to die. As a spectator, you might project yourself in one of the figures, but this line also enables you to decide what kind of distance you want to have.’
‘A sequence of Buñuel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) portrays a group of people eating around a table. This seemingly domestic scene collapses when one of the walls, which was covered by a curtain, suddenly opens. On the other side, there are spectators, watching the figures who, one minute before, seemed to be in a safe situation. The piece I did for the exhibition The World as a Stage at Tate Modern refers to this curtain: you see this impressive curtain in front of you, but you don’t know on which side you are. Are you on stage or in the audience? What would happen if the curtain opened?’
III Repetition
‘All the important things repeat themselves in time. Of course, there are changes, but the feelings do not change. Because of that, I like to switch between times: from the Greek antiquity to today, through the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Each work is a mixture of several temporalities. My specific interest in the nineteenth century is linked to the fact that it stands as a transitory period, just before the modern times, when people still believed in things they couldn’t see. Repetition is also present in the way I realise and show my films. Most of them are based on a loop, with the last image corresponding to the first one. It creates a kind of circular or eternal time.’
‘These elements function as motifs. They include masks, walking sticks, ghosts, or various gestures. My wish is to develop a kind of vocabulary, consisting of different motifs that repeat themselves again and again. But this vocabulary is necessarily incomplete, in the sense that there are always hidden or unknown meanings: you won’t get it all; there is always a secret “society”.’
IV Duality
‘In the film Schlüssel, one woman gives a key to another woman. This gesture evokes many symbolic meanings: it could be the key for Pandora’s Box, the one symbolically given to the mayor of a city, or, in the collective memory, the key for a secret. In this kind of gesture, the idea is to condense different temporalities. Paradoxically, however, the meaning is often unclear or ambiguous. No story is told; there is only the beginning of a story. This ambiguity is also present in a wall drawing I did for the exhibition Again for Tomorrow at the Royal College of Art in 2006. It uses the same technique as the Rorschach test: you make an ink stain and, by folding the paper, you mirror it. The drawing takes as its starting point the motif of a forest and, because it is mirrored, it becomes a metaphor for the unconscious. The ginkgo leaf is present on a jacket that I used in a number of films. I’m interested in the fact you can fold it in the middle, it’s sym-metrical and at the same time ambiguous.’
V 8
‘This idea of movement was already in Schlüssel, which uses a slow panning shot along a group of people gathered in a tableau vivant. The film 8 was shot in a castle in France, the Domaine de Chamarande, and it is a journey through a series of tableaux vivants. The camera pans around the different scenes and traverses the rooms of the castle. Another important aspect is the fact that the film is part of an installation. Its architecture is based on the floor plan of the castle. It has eight different colours, which refer to the experiments with colours developed by Lücher, a Swiss psychologist. In 8, my wish is that the viewer goes around and feels differently, according to the
colours. The installation also plays with the contrast between the colours of the architecture and the black and white of the film. Firstly, there is this abstract construction, and then you see the narrative in the film. It is based on one single, nine-minute panning shot using the Möbius strip – the symbol for eternity – as a pattern. The film’s structure itself is also circular because the first and the last images are the same: it starts and ends with a close-up shot on a painting that depicts the castle’s outside environment.’
Ulla von Brandenburg – 8
Docking Station, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
18 January–24 February 2008
Ulla von Brandenburg – Where there’s a network of red over
the green
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
16 February–20 April 2008
