COLDNESS AS METAPHOR. Eres -Stiftung, Munich

Transcription

1 COLDNESS AS METAPHOR Icebears restage during a spiritual process snow disasters of the history of mankind: the sommer in Europe without sun (1816), the Everest avanlanche (1996) or the plane crash in the Andes (1972), that forced the survivors to cannibalism. 16 mm scanned to 4K / 5 56 min / 2018 / Co - directed by Lion Bischof Page 3-16, Filmstills 16 mm Page 17, 18, Setphotographs Page 19 Drawing Eres -Stiftung, Munich

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15 It is exactly 200 years ago that Mary Shelley published her novel Frankenstein. Its historical background is almost as famous: the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora caused global climate disruptions, crop failures and great famine. The year 1816 went down in history as the year without a summer. Mary Shelley observed the frightening storms on Lake Geneva and her lover Lord Byron challenged her to a writing competition. The topic: horror stories. One could presume such fierce competition behind the bizarre scenes of Felix Burger s new video conceived and made specifically for this exhibition. Clouds of fog pervade the setting. Blood drips from amputated limbs. Frostbite disfigures faces - the scarier the better. But wait! The arm belongs to a doll, the blood is ketchup, the chilblains just the traces of a cake in the face. Is this serious or bizarre, trash or horror? Who are these people in white make-up and strange polar bear costumes who have gathered in a cellar and are listening intently to their gloomy looking mentor? Like an antique choir, they form a circle around their master. Is this some kind of costumed conspiracy sect, an arctic offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan or a harmless theater company? Felix Burger deliberately doesn t say, leaving us in the dark about the characters in his film, as well as the place and time of their encounter. On the other hand, he reveals the simplicity of the tricks and effects he uses: the fog machine, the large mirror, the oven cleaning spray filmed in slow motion that covers colorful flowers like snow, the toy model of a crashed plane, Mount Everest made of wire and paper-mâché. We cannot make out what the mentor is saying to his disciples, instead, tablets with English written on them function as subtitles, formulating the quintessence of what has been said and shown. All this is accompanied by an atmospheric sound that includes the distorted, rattling noise of a film projector. The video was originally shot on 16 mm film and digitalized for post-production. This is how Felix Burger manages to give it the look of a film from the Seventies or Eighties and emphasizes the handmade, the intentionally unprofessional aspects of the various scenes. One of the people in a polar bear costume is also shooting the individual scenes with a camera so Burger has created a film within a film. Burger evokes three specific historical events, which he considers linked to the motif of cold. The ambivalent meaning of the word: temperature and emotional attitude. On the one hand, there is the extreme weather in 1816 that inspired Mary Shelley to write her novel Frankenstein, the plane crash of a rugby team in the snow-capped Andes in 1972, which ended in cannibalism, and finally the tragedy on Mount Everest in 1996, when eight mountain climbers lost their lives. International media coverage made these unfortunate incidents world-famous. The survivors became stars, their experiences bestsellers and box office successes at the movies. That partly explains why these dramatic events stand for far more today than they were in essence. It is not just human tragedy that captivates us, it is mythical exaggeration, sensational, commercialized mountaineering or questions regarding the ethical justifiability of cannibalism. Above all else, what interests Felix Burger as an artist is the fine line between catastrophe and absurdity, between real and fake. What mechanisms are at work when truly existential experiences mutate into crowd-pullers? Perhaps the polar bear people in his film make up part of an amusement park side show of catastrophes that people visit with the cable car that appears at the end of the video. If you get into a gondola, you take part in this macabre circus. Whether it takes you to icy peaks or the lower depths is only a question of direction. Anuschka Koos / Eres-Stiftung, Munich