Single-channel video installation, Motion-Control-System CYST, photo print, 8 min. Bosnian, English.
Trauma prevents realities from aligning with themselves. Pain stops the puzzle pieces from fitting and forming a full picture, so the soul returns to the scene of its scarring over and over. Clarissa Thieme enters these loops of troubled remembrance: There is a video she found in the Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Archive that collects footage of the siege of Sarajevo, filmed by Nedim Alikadic. It shows militia men by a river in a residential area. “Film them,” Alikadic is being urged by his companion. Handheld, the camera nervously moves, pans, and stutters as it seeks to connect to the threat before it. It is this particular camera movement that Thieme tracked with advanced digital image processing technology. The resultant meta-data now control an automatic arm and make it move a ray of light in exactly the same way the hand shifted the camera. Exactitude and ephemerality: extremes meet. The closer ones gets to the traumatic real, it seems, the more strongly it fractures and disperses over different planes of representation. Thieme enters the gap between them, widening it, while simultaneously pulling the fragments of reality together into one unsettling force-field. (Jan Verwoert)
Clarissa Thieme is a Berlin-based artist and filmmaker. Working across film, photography, performance, installation, and text, she combines documentary and fictional forms focusing on processes of memory, politics of identity, and strategies of translation. Her practice is research-based and often takes a collaborative approach. Thieme studied Media Art at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK) and Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice at Universität Hildesheim.
Production Clarissa Thieme. Production company studio clarissa thieme (Berlin, Germany). Written and directed by Clarissa Thieme. Cinematography Till Beckmann, Nedim Alikadic. Editing Clarissa Thieme. Sound design Jochen Jezussek. Sound Clarissa Thieme. Production design Constantin Engelmann. With Nedim Alikadic, Till Beckmann, Clarissa Thieme.
Films
2010: Was bleibt (30 min., Forum Expanded 2010). 2012: The Place We Left (60 min.). 2013: Resort (15 min.). 2016: Die DDR hat es nie gegeben / Appell (4 min.). 2018: Today is 11th June 1993 (15 min., Forum Expanded 2018). 2019: Can't You See Them? – Repeat..
Photo: © Clarissa Thieme
