Nov 15, 6 pm
Lisl Ponger
Passagen, déjà-vu
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Passagen 1996 | 35mm
(N-8, S-8 blow up) | 12 min
déjà-vu 1999 | 35mm
(N-8, S-8 blow up) | 23 min
Passagen
A woman stands alone at the railing of a passenger liner and gazes into the blue. She will remember for us an arrival in New York, the walk of a young couple through China-town, the house boats in Shanghai and the excited children who gather round the visitor with the obscure picture machine. Beneath the pictures the sounds of distant lands can be heard and, in parallel, a montage of various memories and people unfolds. People who at some time either left or arrived in Vienna involuntarily.
Lisl Ponger creates an imaginary map of the twentieth century on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn tracks of occidental memory. The pictures, made by observant tourists, are revealed, in their tensile relationship to the soundtrack, as a post-colonial journey. A journey through exactly those countries which long ago have been shrunk together in space and time.
Finally the wonderful neon signs of the “Hotel Edison“ and ”Radio City” remind one of the origins of this form of appropriation of the world, of the time of great expeditions, of Benjamin‘s shop-windows and passages, and of the time when technical apparatus and means of transportation fundamentally altered the perceptions of modern man.
Christa Blümlinger (Translation: Tim Sharp)
déjà-vu
Somewhere in a subtropical country white visitors crowd around dark-skinned plantation workers emptying their harvest baskets. They look curious, as if wanting to test the quality of the tea leaves. Everywhere tourists take out their cameras —whether in front of large animals in the wild or camel riders, whether in the face of decorated human bodies or daily work routines. Now and again they look into the camera themselves. For later, for when they will proudly show their “exotic” finds at home. This posing contains a model of western travels and picture making which is over a century old. The fascinated gaze on the foreigners fixes them in pre-formed frames. Lisl Ponger follows the trail of that gaze by taking amateur found footage material and linking it together in new ways. She summons up atmospheric background sounds and adds a series of voices. With a subtle distance to the visual foreground, those people who are pictured in the west as much more homogenous than they are have the word—in the diverse languages of the “other”. The,y tell, untranslated, of their experiences with various forms of colonialism—whether as subjects in their own countries or as the expelled and transformed “foreigner”.
Lisl Ponger strings the shots together on a thread, a red one—both in the chromatic and symbolic sense. The sound helps these pictures from the continents of the southern hemisphere to resonate with narrative character. The voices are not allowed to domainate the images, but déjà vu takes a risk by letting the multiplicity of languages speak for themselves. It is a film which does not impart security but poses questions.
Christa Blümlinger (Translation: Tim Sharp)
Lisl Ponger, born1947 in Nürnberg. School of Graphic Arts in Vienna, photography class. Lives and works in Vienna.