2 Dia-Projektionen + 2 Audiointerviews, Dauer: 21:38 min und 24:28 min, Loop
1 Video-Projektion, 16:9, Dauer: 14:50 min, Loop
2008-2010


The work »Zeit totschlagen und Umgebung beobachten« (killing time and watching the surroundings) is assembled by three parts: a video and two slide-projections – each with an associated audio-track, where one can listen to an interview.
I deal – like in many of my early works – with spatial objectives. I always try to capture and transform different types of space like social-, political-, cultural or physical space and their functions.
The artistic medias I use for visualizing this investigation are mostly photography and video.
I make two interviews with my father, who emigrated from Romania to Austria in 1990, crossing illegally the Austrian-Hungarian border; he lived about 10 days at Wien Westbahnhof (the viennese western railway station) and after he was sent to Traiskirchen, where he had to stay another two weeks in Austria’s biggest refugee camp. On these three stations of his emigration I made the three interviews in which he talks about his memories, impressions and experiences of the locations.
How does physical space and past go together and vice versa? And what if this past is constructed through subjective memory?
The three interviews were developed with the same pattern: I made many pre-interviews with my father for a long span of time. They were in Romanian – his first language. I transcribed all that fragments and made a narrative construct. Then I wrote some keywords in German which he had to stick with. So he told me his story again with my dramaturgy.
It’s not clear if the voice in the video is a voice-over or an off-commentary. I see it as a sylistic device for accentuating the spacial- and time-distance of myself, the story-telling person and the media to the story.


traiskirchen web

westbahnhof033-Kopie web

DSC 0365 web

3 oa installfull web