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Follow Fluxus / Emily
Wardill - Sea Oak / The Diamond (Descartes’
Daughter)
September 7 to May 24, 2008
Opening Saturday, September 6, 2008, 4 to 8 pm
with -> publication
with
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The Nassauischer Kunstverein presents the first
Follow Fluxus laureate Emily Wardill (*1977, UK)
with her two most recent film installations Sea
Oak and The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter).
“This is a stand-in for Francine, Descartes’
daughter, who never washed up on the shores of
Sweden. (…)” with this sentence, a mechanical
sounding Swedish accent begins the film The
Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008, 15min). Her
words describe the almost entirely black scene
projected to the wall in 16mm: A 12year-old girl
is playing Nintendo Wii. The only source of
light are twitching stroboscope flashes that are
reflected by the white stripes on her arms and
legs, tracing her movements. The costume she’s
wearing is the one that French physiologist,
inventor and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey
(1830- 1904) had his models wear for his
chronophotographic photos that were the first
depiction of motion broken down into still
images.
From this image onwards, the voice guides us
through an interweaved netting of different
myths creeping into one another along a chain of
associations built up by voice and image.
The scene grows dark. One hears only the
narration of an unsuccessful search for a
certain scene in a film where a diamond
protected by lasers gets stolen by a robotic
hand. The film this scene comes from can’t be
found : In the speaker’s memory, the images
always were different form the real movies: In
the „Thomas Crown Affair“1, it’s not a diamond,
„Entrapment“2 is too recent, in „Pink Panther“3 the actual theft is missing completely. So a
decision is made to shoot the remembered scene.
Yet instead of trying to evade the laser grid,
the actors on set create it themselves: Trying
to keep their hands steady, they reflect one
single laser beam around the diamond on a
pedestal. It is scenes from this sequence that
accompany the voice’s stream of thoughts on the
screen.
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