speech

In her experimental video speech, Michaela Schwentner has taken up the invitation by French musician Paul Clouvel to illustrate his composition of the same name. Michaela Schwentner trenchantly aestheticizes Paul Clouvel’s soundscape, for which, among other things, he deconstructs the language of contemporary artist Joël Frémiot.

speech thereby emerges as a multiply overwritten communication process among artists from various disciplines. Like a choreographer, the video artist Schwentner carries out the visual metamorphosis of a standard dance, which begins from something unrecognizable. On the sound track, electro-acoustic processes and intense fragmentation render a text spoken by a dominant male narrating voice increasingly vehement. Schwentner subtly counteracts the sound with soft, abstract bodies pulsating as though ghostly creatures and pink flames on the picture surface. A painterly poetics surrounds Schwentner’s digital structure, which one credits to her intuitive female sensibility. The visual particles, which are constantly subjected to transformations and shifts in rhythm, actually emerge as the trunk and legs of a dancing woman. Half of a dance partner then joins in.

Schwentner deconstructs her original material once again—an insert of Ginger and Fred in the eponymous film by Fellini. The image, which has been alienated by video effects, has a groove to it. The dress swings, transforms, and discloses anew the glory of concise reduction. With speech, Michaela Schwentner continues her clear and independent vision of abstraction.

(Petra Erdmann)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt