06
un-dramatics
Un-dramatics is a project in collaboration with Rena Leinberger. Inspired by the ideas in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power, the Un-dramatics series of four videos takes up the history of landscape representation, ideology and ensuing violence as a starting point.
2011-2012
The production consists of one take and the camera does not move for the duration of the video. The viewer first hears footsteps rustling leaves and thumping closer, then farther. Shots ring in the distance. One at a time, two figures appear, searching each other out with paintball guns. The gunfire is indiscriminate both off camera and on, splaying color.
As the two figures shoot at each other, paintballs pierce the scene and the viewer realizes the forest view is a photograph rather than reality. Eventually the two protagonists, while still attempting to obliterate one another entirely obliterate the image to reveal the identical reality beyond.
We utilize the history of image as backdrop in film. A familiar conceit in set design employs a photo backdrop in combination with other artificial constructions to create an alternate reality.
In this video, we consciously omitted everything in the “set” with exception of the photograph. The photograph became the set and reality is assumed. Image, illusion and ideology are conflated to interrogate the way landscape is represented as contested territory. Creating a space in which an act of iconoclasm seems to reveal reality questions assumptions about even this presentation, as it is yet another framed representation mediated through video.