Lettuce Partially Emerging from a Shopping Bag, 2014
HD-video, poster, objects and exhibition architecture
 
In Suspended Duration, 2014 the central work of the installation, ordinary objects – a beverage can, a rope, plasticine, a plastic bag full of groceries, a shopping cart, etc.– are the protagonists. The film mimics to document the proceedings in a motion-study laboratory in which every-day interactions with objects are recorded against b/w raster backgrounds. The scientific abstraction that the film allegedly aspires is only hinted at. Instead the contingency of the filmic image –tripods, fixtures, chairs, parts of the laboratory, etc.– are included in the framing of the actual picture, as well as accidental footage and sound recordings of on-set conversations before and after the takes.
While science film usually aims at eliminating redundancy Suspended Duration literally widens the frame(-ing) and moves the fringes to the center, it includes all kinds of aspects that surround the actual area of interest, both in a spatial and a temporal way. This is further emphasized by the way in which sound and image relate to each other. The film treats them as independent sources of information that only for intervals achieve synchronicity.

Alongside the film a series of banal objects (a fire extinguisher, a trestle, an office chair or a piece of iron tube, a canister windscreen detergent) is presented in conjunction with posters of enlarged pages from books on ergonomics. Each page examines a particular aspect of the human body when it deals with objects: sight, motoric skills or muscle fatigue.

The title of the installation Lettuce partially emerging from a shopping bag is taken from the book Attempt at exhausting a place in Paris by French writer Georges Perec. In order to write the book Perec sat on a square in Paris for three days in a row and noted everything that he saw. The installation follows Perec’s interest in what he called “the infraordinary: the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of our lives”*

Suspended Duration consists of film material that has also been used for the short films of the public art work Formen Legitimer Herrschaft, in which the individual films can be accessed by scanning QR codes placed on posters distributed throughout the city.

* Geroges Perec, An attempt at exhausting a Place in Paris, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, 2010