Resurrections

The video is composed as a phantasmagoric vision of transparency, rationality, violence and fragility. Gelatin, the essence of photographic emulsion and a substance gained from cattle bones until today, brings objects, people and animals back to live in the form of animated images in film. The purified essence of death creates the uncanny doubling of life in form of filmic specters and shadows. All images and film fragments in the video were brought together in a research on the German film factory Agfa and its relation with the German Gelatin-industry from the end of the 19th Century on. Cattle bones were not only collected in Germany but also imported in large amounts from India and Brazil. A main component of the video consists of early X-ray images of bodies and industrial machines, published by the Agfa scientist John Eggert, in order to teach students how to read the signs in the radiographs and how to distinguish flaws in the photographic emulsion itself from signs and symptoms of fatigue or injuries in bodies and machines. Eggert took the X-Rays from the bodies of the workers and the machines of the very Agfa factory.

‍

The prints are made from scanned glassplate negatives from the beginning of the 20th Century from the archive of the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. In all the photographs the vegetation contrasts with the presence of a measuring rod. The fragments of sentences printed onto the images stem from various historical travel accounts.

‍

The video Phantom(1) is the virtual manifestation of an hallucinating, etheric and discarnate body set in an obsolete electronics megastore. The title of the work also refers to a high-speed camera brand with the same name, which can register anything between 1 and 1000 fps and which is often used by anonymous makers to shoot generic and extreme slow motion stock footage

‍