Output details

The Prisoner

Manifesta 7, Trentino, Italy. Three exhibitions with three curators in three locations in the region.

This is an installation with two projectors projecting one film consecutively, with a short delay between the two. The film follows a woman walking through an urban landscape. In the film 'La Captive' (2001) by Chantal Akerman there is an early sequence in which a man follows a woman through Paris streets. She is wearing high-heeled silver shoes. I maintain that the clicks of her heels were recorded at the wrong aural distance: the heels seem exaggerated, as if close to the viewer, while we see her far away. This wrongness serves a bigger purpose: it seems to enhance the claustrophobic feeling of sexual control and obsession that the scene enacts. The slight mismatch of picture and sound combine to offer a feeling of heightened reality.

My installation was an attempt to create that feeling with a combination of cinematic and mechanical means. To my knowledge the first artist to use this technique, I passed one film through two projectors that sat side by side, so that it travels through one and is screened, and then crosses over about one foot of space and enters the second projector, a process that takes six or seven seconds. What you see is the same film on two screens, one playing six seconds behind the other. The chasing of the film from one projector to the other and back mimics the ghosting that is happening on the screens, and generates the same disorientation and displacement that the heels recorded wrongly gave in the original sequence. Through these displacements I wanted to show two transformations, filmic time into physical space, and a slight mechanical change effecting new meaning. The film had 108,000 visitors.