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„Vom Kommen und vom Gehen“ Marcel Odenbach Marcel Odenbach, one of the pioneers of video art in Germany, has increasingly been concerning himself with escape and migration since the mid 1990’s. His videos oppose oblivion and bestow a historical dimension on contemporary images. In “Vom Kommen und vom Gehen” (About coming and going) he superimposes different levels of time. Following an initial sequence showing a small modern-day sailing boat, the viewer is confronted with historical found footage. Hitler can be seen attending a naval review. Throughout the entire film, two levels keep overlapping each other. On the one side, cargo ships, pleasure and sports boats are cruising across the picture with the background of an industrial area. On the other side, contrasting images surface from the water like ghosts, Submarines from World War II, and refugee boats from different periods of the 20th century (from overcrowded freighters to rubber dinghies). The sound ranges from: Schubert, Wagner’s “Rhinegold,” noises from the boats and the water, to House and Hip-Hop music – a journey from German high culture to Afro-American subculture. All images and elements are part of a history of migration: the waters around New York, where the pleasure-boats cruise, Afro-American music, German warships, and of course refugee boats. This history cannot be read in the surface of the water, whereby it becomes a metaphor for oblivion. Odenbach, instead, produces these “interference images” from the depth of the water. “Vom Kommen und vom Gehen” ends as laconically as its title suggests. Two men walk along a pier at New York’s Hudson River, in slow motion, that is to some extent displaced from the present: images of a life in contemporary New York. Artist, born 1953, lives and works in Cologne. |
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