THE LANDSCAPE, THE ROOM, 2006 ...
STANDING, 2007In the work 'Standing' Evanthia Tsantila uses video, drawings and photographs to create a narrative, describing the effort of a vulnerable human body to obtain collective and personal memory. Frau Wolff is standing in places that presumably promote this endeavor, such as public buildings and monuments. Her drawings, which come from archive material, along with the photographs illustrate the inability of memory to travel through its own means.
THE SILENCE; 2007
Installation, construction and 2 video projections
Three characters are taking part in a confrontation, where language fails to communicate anything at all and to resolve the complexity of their relations. A hotel room hosts this moment.
In this project I interrogate the relation between space, time and narrative through a transposition into real space and time of a sequence from Ingmar Bergman's film.
With the participation of two actors and a non-actor, the film sequence is freely reconstructed as an installation piece.
This round-like space had been, initially, imaginatively suggested and subsequently found its analogue in the well-known Melnikov residence in Moscow. I seek to explore further the bewilderment felt by one walking around that house, the feeling that one walks in circles while walled in, a feeling that objects and persons are a déjà-vu.
The collaboration with actors and the dependence of the theatre’s structures and mechanisms pose an additional challenge in the struggle to delineate the autonomy of each art form and each art work.
How to build time? That which cannot be spoken yet is in language. That which cannot appear, yet leaves traces behind. From these absent fragments a space may appear and be grasped.
E.T.
Neither, strictly speaking, a work of translation, nor of transformation, nor of re-presentation, Evanthia Tsantila’s The Silence tranposes and superimposes certain parameters of space and time to the point of slow but insistent centripetal implosion. Referencing both a temporal segment (a verbal exchange) and a spatial/architectural unit (a particular classic) from Ingmar Bergman’s pièce extraordinaire from 1963, not by accident carrying the same name as Tsantila’s piece, these sources are then reenacted, reconstructed and, as said transposed. The references, or the source material, is however put under such capillary pressure that that most elements - properties, sensations, feelings, propositions, languages - are subverted or unsettled. And what is generated – through two videos, a soundtrack, a space/architecture/objects) - is essentially, between the two protagonists, the breakdown of communication, a caesura, a slippage, a time warp, a point of no return and yet without a specified future. Further enhanced by the peculiarly circular, or even labyrinthic but yet small-scale architecture (taking its cue from the Melnikov residence in Moscow), and further provoked by the silent witness/observer in the 2nd video, the viewer, always the final protagonist, like the two protagonists in the work, finds her/himself in a stalemate, at an impasse, in an a-topic space where language, time, space, words, communication stumble around, tumbling on top of each other, not finding the way out or onward.
Jan-Erik Lundström, director Bildmuseet Umea Sweden
THE LANDSCAPE, THE ROOM, 2006
2 drawings, pencil and ink on paper, 2x2 m each
With the present series of drawings I attempt to interrogate the mechanisms of memory generation as well as the means of its transmission. I take myself into imaginary landscapes constituted by the very process of this interrogation, re-instituting my relation to history, to others, to the representational means of the present, to the body, and our alienation from it.
I do not offer the recorded past up for symbolisation. These drawings are not allegories of catastrophe but its appearance. The dense metropolitan grid, the empty room of a flat abandoned after a disaster has occurred, a fragment from an important etching of European history, human figures, a wolf, a ship, they are all incipiently recognisable elements due to their familiar form. Yet by revealing their complexion, as an aborted interiority that cannot become exterior, these elements -presented in an x-ray like manner, conveying the neutrality of a scientific report, and shedding any sense of naturalness- appear as remote and alien. I' m not familiar with my interior. I probe into the interiority of the body, whether that of a human being or a thing, a body which is at once taken for granted, by necessity familiar, and impossible to be captured. In the first drawing there's recorded visually the trace of Walter Benjamin's phrase as it flashes up inside the landscape.
Under the constant assault of realistic/naturalistic images and the claim to truth launched by the dominant structures of representation, recording and memorialisation, the withered eye further atrophies into the pre-given and unchallenged identities available by the meaning generating mechanisms. Such identifications make, in effect, impossible any comprehension of what has happened and is happening to humanity individually and collectively.
I try to face, obliquely, what cannot appear in itself but also try to record the failure of generating the memory that could have sheltered it. Memory 'flashes up' for a moment and in this flash leaves its trace. This trace as it appears somewhere, almost as an image, I seek. How to allow the incomprehensible appear? ?hat which we fleetingly catch sight of at a side glance and, while turning our heads trying to grasp it, flees again to the perplexed regions of a strange margin.
Evanthia Tsantila, 2006