3D installation art, multiple video projections, immersive soundscape - In Progress
My heart is heavy, my eyes see differently, strangeness in the clouds above me. My thoughts are everywhere, spreading like the clouds in my coffee.
I observe someone performing seemingly everyday actions in an almost ritual manner. The context, the reason why, the relationship to the environment remains somewhat hidden in these images - this is nothing more than a lifeless, white, abstract backdrop that seems to isolate her/him in the image. Everything is slowed down, the world seems to fall completely silent outside of that ritual.
In my mind I see a river. It's as red as my blood, carrying my roots, my mother, my father - even the child I loved but was never born.
By making the visitor part of an installation, I want to raise questions about our “automatic thinking” that never stops, about being just there and just not there anymore, about how we unconsciously drift with certain thoughts and feelings.
What goes on in that person's head is translated into a truly 3D experience that are about stimuli, flashes, pieces of memory and confusion. Those images are very gripping, intense, ASMR-like. They also contrast in speed and movement with what is seen in the first video.
The second video allows the visitor to 'walk' inside the brain. This particular sequence related to stimuli has been made part of the exhibition 'Dubbelganger', @ BAM!, ABK Mortsel, Belgium, 25/01-08/02/2025
The starting point of this project was my father-in-law's dementia process. In a first phase, he became very forgetful, told about strange things he saw in the clouds. He sometimes noticed things and persons that were not there, woke up very confused from dreams where he thought he was in the most bizarre places. Sometimes he even spoke a different language. Until finally he found himself in an assisted living facility, among other people who all live in the same kind of confusion - but somewhere, also seem very searching for what they have lost.
Where is the rock-solid personality of the man he once was, the strict math teacher who always wanted to get the dots and commas right even in his own life?
Something of that is hidden in that glimmer of consciousness that still emerges just briefly in a few daily rituals, in a recognizable expression or some fragments of a sentence, but it has become elusive, it is lost again very quickly.
The microscopic universe around him still excites but the correct interpretation, the correct response to what happens in that environment has become extremely difficult. Even standing up for a moment, or drinking a cup of coffee, takes its toll on him.