SO MANY IDEAS
“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”
And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
SO MANY IDEAS is a theatrically-charged five-channel video work with a total duration of 35’ exploring the generation of uneases through psychology and suggestion as a rhetorical device not dissimilar to those proposed by Bertolt Brecht’s concept of ‘Epic Theatre’.
Consisting of a single, flickering static image of a pharmacy sign in Seville, Spain with a series of related stories and sound design, the videos riff off Mark Fisher’s essays on the production and experience of ‘the weird’ and ‘the eerie’ as elements of ‘Capitalist Realism’; I explore these phenomena as more appropriate contemporary analogues for the rhetorical distance required to read the world we are within.
Recurring citations of frontiers and thresholds, familiarity and indistinction, accumulation and accretion, cross-cultural displacement, nostalgia for imagined memories, stories buried under stories, a ready assumption of complicity pepper stories that could be yarns, could be documentary.
Currently in post-production.
35’ (5 x 7’) / Spain, Germany / 2019 / HD
CREDITS:
Glen Sheppard, Director, writer
Fritz Polzer, Camera
Tomas Nordmark, Sound