double channel video installation, 33`
A commission by Audiorama in Stockholm, funded by The Swedish Art Council. The research was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund

In the film “Silent Movie” (1976) a film director places a phone call to Marcel Marceau to ask him to star in a silent film. The world famous mime picks up the phone and shouts “No!”. Thirty-five years later the exact same stunt is repeated by Cesar, the chimpanzee protagonist in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011). Previously a speechless animal, he suddenly grabs the cattle prod out of the hands of his human prison guard and shouts “No!”.

In the two-channel video installation The Mime and the Ape, a narrator returns again and again to these two scenes treating them as two origin stories. If one scene takes us back to the origins of sound film, the other scene takes us all the way back to the origins of human language. With the help of the two scenes, the narrator weaves a winding tale about the inability of language to articulate its own origin.

What unites the two figures – mime and ape – is that as soon as they open their mouths to speak, they both immediately disappear. If the first word was ‘no’, then that word must have been directed back at the very creature that gave it voice. For once one has uttered such a ‘no’, one can no longer be a mime nor an animal but must always already be a speaking being. The video work investigates how the use of (the technology of) language leads to an immediate and complete break with the world we experience with our senses. The eyes turn away from the immediate present; all action is now determined by a gaze into the future. From the standpoint of language, any previous stage is reduced to a mere shadow of what came after; an afterimage cast by language itself.

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Feelers, Sensors