Freitag, 28. Dezember 2007, 21 Uhr

Johanna Domke:

"Unbreakable Space" HD DVC PRO on DVD 6:36 min
Director/Author: Johanna Domke
Cinematographer: Anna Misselwitz: Cory Choy
Sound: James Wellburn
Edit: Johanna Domke



“Unbreakable Space” is a 3-screen video installation, emphasizing upon the psychology of functionalized public space and sites of transit. The camera focuses on a crowd of commuters in a central train station in London, waiting for their gate to be announced. Domke condenses the situation by directing the camera on to people's faces and expressions, turning an everyday occurrence to an emotional state. Elevating the situation towards a notion of uncanniness this filmic portrait is depicting elements of fiction and reality, related in a transcendental way, resulting in a state of timelessness.


Sleepers(DV CAM on DVD 10:40 min)
“Sleepers” is shot during a night at Stansted airport, located outside of London. Stansted is known for being the central airport for cheap airlines and because of its location and the very early departures many passengers spend the night at the airport. The camera silently moves through the entrance hall and pans the sleeping people that lay spread around over the chairs of the waiting area or simply on the floor. It seems as if the airport has come to a standstill.

Crossing Fields(HD DVC PRO transferred to DVD 12:14 min/loop)
Director/Author: Johanna Domke
Producer: Jan Kern
1st AD: Armanda Weiss
2nd AD: Tik San
Sound: Armanda Weiss
Edit: Johanna Domke



In the video “Bookstore”, Domke emphasizes upon the private use of commercial space and “Crossing fields” emphasizes upon the private use of commercial space and portraits reading people in a bookstore. The video was filmed in a bookshop in Beijing, as this phenomenon is broadly common in mayor cities in China. Due to obsolete libraries, bookstores function as an open source of knowledge, which attracts crowds of people to spend their free time in the sometimes gigantic bookstore complexes. But instead of buying the books people spend entire days, sitting and reading thronged together, spread around the store. As the management approves this, the reading people's private use of space is becoming prevalent to the commercial activity in the store. Johanna Domke is interested in this kind of anarchic use of space and the depiction of stasis evolving within the situation. Winding its way through the statue-like readers the camera captures with close and intimate images the ambiguity of their presence. Being physically present they sojourn at the same time in the fictive sphere of their reading. The immobile appearance of the readers leaves the impression that the camera is moving within a frozen moment of time. Domke's last works are inspired by the anthropologist Marc Augé and his discourse on non-places, characterized as anonymous sites that cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity. As society is adopting increasingly transitory and commercialized structures, the individual figures as a solitary being unconnected to its surroundings. Nevertheless it is the reconstitution of such a space or better said the coexistence of a private sphere and an anonymous environment, which is the starting point to Domke's latest production. Ignorant to the order of commercial space the reading people focus on their own purpose converting the space to a hybrid of opposed polarities. They work like palimpsests on which the scrambled concepts of identity and space are ceaselessly rewritten.