NOISY RUPTURES - Animation from Austria

In WHERE I LIVE / WO ICH WOHNE, Susi Jirkuff traces a person’s sudden descent, not only narratively, but also visually, image by image. Right at the start, the protagonist says, “I’ve been living one floor below since yesterday.” But no one around her reacts to this extraor-dinary situation.In Jirkuff’s animation, based on a story by Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), the parts of the house develop a life of their own. Along with the handrail and the wallpaper, even the white drawing surfaces are affected: Jirkuff’s charcoal strokes and the coal dust from Aichinger’s text color them gray (after all, coal is stored in the cellar where the narrating voice ultimately ends up). Here, as previously in Vermessung der Distanz (2019), Susi Jirkuff’s interest is not only in the spatiality of the building, but also the (non-)behavior of the fellow humans. No one asks, “Didn’t you live next door to us just yesterday?” (Andreas Dittrich, translation: Lisa Rosenblatt)

Portraits appropriated from old films and magazines become anonymized: Radiant tulips and spiky cacti whir behind cut-out mattes of peoples’ heads. The flowers rotate, dance, pulsate. A botanical fever dream unfolds, framed by lustrous hair, pearl necklaces, evening gowns or gray uniforms. In contrast to the vibrant frenzy of the floral imagery, the framing is static and in black and white. The imagery is accompanied by Kurt Schwitters’ poem Sie Puppt mit Puppen (She Dolls With Dollies) from 1944. It is fragmented from the get-go, with lines tumbling to and fro until the words break down and dissolve into an electronic beatbox carpet of sound. Individual words crystallize out of the rhythmically fragmented babble. In the end, the short poem is heard in its original entirety. The video created by Karin Fisslthaler is a visual interpretation of the audio composition by Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern, which wildly transforms Schwitters’ poem as it taps into the author’s interest in decomposition and deconstruction. (Charlie Bendisch, Friederike Horstmann, translation: Eve Heller)

In SUBOTOPIC, the viewer’s gaze dives below the water’s surface downwards into ever deeper layers of the underwater world. In morphed single-frame switching, bizarre pictorial plants and insect creatures pass by the viewer. We dive into lightless spaces until we penetrate a surface of light again. Diving deeper and deeper, existing parallel worlds are made visible under water and new utopias are created. Above and below, inside and outside dissolve. A dive into a mystical underwater world where reality and utopia meet.

2022: A Spaced-Out Odyssey. A trip experience that enables exactly those levels of consciousness, or rather their dissolution, that the consumption of certain intoxicants also makes possible. In just three minutes of HAPPY DOOM’s cinematic movement, I get the impression of falling through the screen into an alternative space, am briefly reminded of the material of the screen– its material reality – and in the same instant witness a journey into the interior of my eye. The boundaries between inside and outside, me and the world, the virtual and the material, all become permeable, ambiguous, irrelevant: I am the origin and object of a gaze, I am actually there and gotten lost, sitting in the movie theatre and falling through space and time, with everything in flux in an infinite, never-ending circular movement. (Alejandro Bachmann, translation: John Wojtowicz)

Mr. Ham decides to have his heart removed in order to be relieved of his complicated feelings. The doctor assures him that this is no longer a problem at all in this day and age. However, Ham decides to keep his heart for a while after the removal in order to perhaps understand it a bit better after all. TAKO TSUBO* is an animated, surrealistic reflection on dealing with feelings in a meritocracy.

*Tako Tsubo, also known as stress cardiomyopathy or broken heart syndrome, is a rare, acute and often serious functional disorder of the heart muscle, similar to a heart attack, and is usually caused by exceptional emotional or physical stress.