Me/We

With playful casualness, Sing me back home (before I die) tells the story of a young man’s journey (back) from loneliness to a life in the human community. He only comes round in encounters with others – in discussions, through touch, in play. In A Window Is a Mirror Is a Window, a girl looks at her reflection in a shop window, the camera observes her from the inside, follows her, lies in wait for her: a miniature about looks and glances. In prison, the only view of the real world “out there” is the view from the window. Eine weibliche Stimme spricht zögernd und stockend einen Text über ein fremdes Land, eine männliche Stimme korrigiert sie, lacht. Unterlegt ist das ungleiche Zwiegespräch mit Bildern tropischer Vulkanlandschaften, verlockend und unheimlich zugleich. Sie sind wie ein Versprechen: There Is a Happy Land Further Awaay. In G_Girls (Gracie), we hear a girl talking to her friend on the phone, bitching and fantasising. For her desires, the bourgeois setting of her parents’ home offers shelter and storage space alike. In early photography, long exposure times meant that, if a portrait was to be taken of a child, the girl or boy was placed on the mother’s lap to ensure they kept still. The mother was hidden under a throw. De Ontwaring adapts this technique for cinematic studies of children in front of the camera. Fragments of medical records, cut into each other, recount the developmental pathways of female psychiatric patients in wegzaubern. The bureaucratically standardised attributions of normality and deviation place themselves around each individual life like an iridescent narrative shroud, like a film, making them disappear.