video installation, sound (5.1)

Part speculative history of the future, part worldbuilding rendering, Farewell recording for an observer of an unknown time and place is an essayistic digression on capitalism, environment, technology and death. Central to the work is “Invasive Landscape Phenomenon”, a mysterious, fast spreading malady. Reminiscent of dissociative trauma response, this affliction emerges in a world on the verge of ecological collapse, in which first-hand experience is replaced by a mediated alternative to physical presence.

The charged cinematic atmosphere sustains a continuous sensation of melancholia, while a dreary sense of digital doom radiates from the imposed change in the experience of being in the world. Smooth aerial drone shots of coastal and inland wetlands occupy the screen in fluid succession. While the continuous voice of the narrator weaves the layers of Farewell Recording’s reality, wetlands fold in their complex histories from the world outside of it; histories of destruction, displacement and dispossession.

Notions of loss, trauma and placelessness intertwine with environmental collapse narratives. Science fiction becomes both vehicle and methodology to express and investigate hypothetical temporalities; a ground in which documentary and fiction compete and time wraps upon itself. Farewell Recording for an observer of an unknown time and place is a dense, many-layered piece, steered by the thoughts of a moving-image sequence editor and their first-person account of their way out of life itself.

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