Dust from Hole

DUST FROM HOLE is a experimental documentary / art short film, blending the artistic mediums of sculpture, performance and film. Using the genre of auto-fiction, the film aims at extending reality into fiction while being a personal portrait of a family in their house, asking questions on family and togetherness in rural Germany; on distance and being (too) close. It deals with the alienation from something that was once familiar while imagining possible or impossible interruptions into the cycles of daily life in the countryside; a difference from what is expected to stay the same. In this way the alien objects as protagonists of the film become placeholders for the stories we tell and are told within a family, from generation to generation, and the storytelling to the outside of the family, where fiction is mixed into every level of retelling a story and recounting of a memory and every representation is followed by an observing eye in the small community. The hen and the egg as part of everyday life on site are a symbol of cycles of reproduction, from birth to death through generations, while at the same time pointing at the core paradoxical narrative structure. In the context of the film, this paradox translates into content and structure: the cycles of inspiration and materialization in the artistic process. What came first?

interpretation as mutation/
The experimental documentary DUST FROM HOLE is based on the transformation of a previous object-based work into a script for a time-based work. The process of creation and production of the sculptures is interpreted into the construction of a narrative for the film, the objects becoming part of the identity of the film's script - one medium infecting another. In absolute immersion over the length of a film, we make a hole in our life, a cut in the narrative flow of our own lives, insert a piece of another narrative via cut-up into the narrative that becomes part of our own. The sculptures dealt with the ambiguity and uncertainty emanating from a hole, the aspect of the unexpected and disappearance - What disappears and what appears when we tear a hole into the film’s narrative?

placement / incision
Through the pattern of the kitchen tiles, the object family is recognized.
A family of objects, all almost the same and yet different, just as a family hangs together, even if each generation mutates. A solid community in which being "among us" must constantly renegotiate the balance of being (too) close and distance; pressure and expectations stand next to patience and boredom. Instead of constructing a situation, I intervene in an already existing scenario, in placing myself with the objects in it. The context is the rural environment in the middle of Germany, the house in which I grew up, with my family as amateur actors of different generations, who comment on themselves. Experiences, questions and problems of the actors appear as clues to the objects that emerge. Which aspects are constructed and which are real becomes blurred, expanding reality into fiction. The objects become part of the reality on site, standing next to familiar objects and everyday actions of the family, which are themselves thereby alienated.

alienated familiarities/
Something is a part of it, but also not. (it has become distant) Something that was once familiar becomes alien. Something alien is implemented into the daily repetition cycles of the same in the countryside. It seems as if they are preparing something that always starts over again. As if they are putting something in order that eludes it. Are they ordering the narration of their own lives or that of the film? The paradoxical narration of the film leaves this open, everything seems to repeat itself. How do we make an incision, an interruption, a difference from what is always the same? A constructive black-out, new start? In the film, there is a constant re-creation of an image of what this community is and how it presents itself to the public, as well as the question of how truth is presented in public. Greetings are sent, the newspaper is read, questions are asked about what to say and how to say it. The question arises to what extent the real situation is in itself socially constructed. Different layers of fact and fiction come together: In this already socially constructed relationship, people perform while others observe them and the latter are more than aware of their expectant gaze. The family reads the object as a newspaper, it becomes a placeholder for the stories we tell and are told, within a family from generation to generation and the storytelling to the outside. How do they present themselves to them? How can one evolve if everything has to stay the same?