Grass A/B

Sabine Marte´s Grass A/B is a paradoxical piece: it tells us a story - by not telling the story; it abruptly interrupts moving images, zooms in, causes us to look - but shows us nothing. The video is an experiment, an attempt; its structure is strict. The camera films green spaces, strokes: vertically up and down; horizontally to the right and to the left. The view moves quickly; impressionistic beige spaces appear - passing over. The individual positions alternate and at the sound level combine with conversational pieces of a dialogue between A and B. The conversation and the images are placed in a loop, which breaks free and becomes somewhat independent, thus creating a development, a narrative flow. Repeating and accelerating, snipping off pieces of language and image, constructing irritation through sudden camera movement or the altered pitch of the voices: something is coming to a climax here. And it is almost as if something had really happened.

Grass A/B investigates how stories are told; how meaning is constructed. This takes place in that stories and meanings dissolve and deconstruct in a playful and appealing way, rythmically, like a dance. On the surface, the video tempts us to follow what is shown and said, to want to perceive it; but we are allowed only to view the material, the materiality of color and voice. Yet on another level - beyond what is evident - we recognise in the ritual movement of the loop, the functioning of the convention and the rhetoric of speech and image.

(Sylvia Szely)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt