Rasender Stillstand

Rasender Stillstand

2021 – 41:51 min (Loop), two channel video installation

The installation "Rasender Stillstand" (Accelerated Standstill) is a nocturnal journey through the beginnings of the Corona Crisis in 2020.

A wall-mounted flatscreen, i.e. the television "ground glass", becomes the windshield of a car that seems to be driving through adverse weather in the dark of night. With the stare of a first-person shooter directed into the far distance, we drive through an obscure world without recognizing anything or arriving anywhere. Actually, we drive, literally, against the wall.

Radio reports from the first two months of the Corona pandemic, namely January and February 2020, are heard from the off. The date of the message to be heard appears on a small monitor under the large "windshield". We thus experience the spread of an unknown virus and what protective actions are recommended and taken. The car becomes a kind of shelter or isolation cell from infectious viruses and people.

It should be obvious that the video is an (extra bad) studio production with "special effects", i.e. fake, to underline the absurdity and unrealness of this situation.

The title refers to Paul Virilio's essay „L'inertie polaire“ (Polar inertia) from 1987, in which he describes the schizophrenic state of a simultaneity of enormous acceleration of digital communication with total paralysis of the body. "Swept along by the tremendous violence of speed, we are moving nowhere." (Virillo) Through the new techniques of instantaneous interactivity, we are "much closer to the distant than to our immediate neighbor, increasingly detached from ourselves." First people became fixed in houses, then in "automotive furniture" and vehicles, then through telepresence - a travel without traveling and a movement without moving - according to Virilio.

The video installation was shown in winter 2021 at the Kunstmuseum Ahlen as part of the exhibition "Reset. Crises/Chance" and in spring 2022 as part of my solo exhibition "Protection" at the gallery Art Claims Impuls in Berlin.

Assistance: Franziska Röhlig, Maryna Makarenko; Advisor: Thomas Kutschker; Special Effects: Bodo Seipke; Sound Design: Christian Obermaier;