Aphasia, a feature-length film essay, deals with the politics of memory and oblivion inscribed in social and historical contexts. In three chapters Aphasia detects a thread of positions of power, racism, injustice and violence from Belgian colonialism, Austrian anti-Semitism and atrocities in Bosnia during the wars in Yugoslavia.
A film poem filmed at Antwerp Zoo echoes diasporic voices of displacement. The work is inspired by the writings of W.G. Sebald, who offered an alternative model of memory through intertextuality and a metonymical narrative technique.
Song consists of four chapters, each exploring the different connotations of the song ‘To You, Dear Mother’. They thematise the complex problematics of exile and place(lessness), with the song as the video’s lifeline.
Mira, Study for a Portrait is a work on absence, which uses the form of the portrait to explore the fragility of memory as well as the relationship between the photographic medium and perception.
still / adjective / devoid of or abstaining from motion, uttering no sound : quiet, subdued, muted; calm, tranquil, free from noise or turbulence
still / adverb / always, continually
Through the most intimate confessions of habitually unspoken, hidden dark thoughts, urges and needs outside acceptable or polite behaviour, altered images of oneself and others, as well as one’s life, this work brings us close to the inner struggle of woman temporarily ’closed for inventory’.
In What it Feels Like for a Girl photography was chosen as the visual medium of the examination, and not only representation, of the female subject in contemporary culture.
The videos present subjects, young, academically educated polyglots from Eastern Europe, dressed up as “Mozarts”, selling concert tickets in the streets of Vienna. But rather than their predetermined and fixed identities, the issue here is a complex juxtaposition of different signifiers (de)constructing these identities: costumed bodies in constant motion in public space, their biographies and favourite songs sung by an authentic “inner” voice.
Tourism as a form of contemporary organized behaviour presupposes certain conditions. One of them is the freedom of movement and the other is the existence of one’s home.