Collocarsi, 2023
on view at Villa Filanda Antonini, Treviso (IT) https://www.vfa.art
Video installation: 3 videos, projectors, wire ropes, mirrors
Swinda Oelke‘s artistic practice involves exploring our immediate surroundings and delves into the underlying structures and systems that often go unnoticed. Her works are site-specific video sculptures that stem from the practice of dismantling and reassembling projectors. First as a symbolic gesture of removing the corporate casing from her medium, and additionally, to gain a deeper understanding of their inner workings, becoming familiar with them as a material. Through persistent experimentation, she mastered their technical function and the projectors now serve as integral sculptural elements in her art, showcasing the raw honesty of their mechanisms.
During her residency, Oelke was fascinated by the system of gates that allows the entrance to the neighbouring houses. Two videos, facing opposite sides of the room, reflect on this idea of private property, where every house has its garden, every garden its fence and every fence its gate with a yellow flickering light.Playing with the different heights, Oelke brings these exterior details into the vast halls of the factory building, once recording the movement of the gate, once positioning the camera on top of the gate and taking advantage of its movement.
The main artwork, positioned central to the end of the room, owns the space of the warehouse with a projection that moves into space. This precise use of reflections, featuring a mirror suspended from the ceiling, slowly spinning due to air circulation in the exhibition space, is a key aspect of her practice. The video is projected through the mirror, moving around itself as the mirror rotates, reflecting the projector‘s point of view back onto the space. This experimental video installation exemplifies Oelke‘s signature style, incorporating cameras, projections, and mirrors in relation to place, often with almost imperceptible elements like air circulation, which is significantly influenced by viewers’ presence. Visitors who walk around the video installation will be able to invert the direction of the projection by walking in the opposite direction. Her work is thus not really affecting a bi-dimensional surface, but a tri-dimensional one blending into the room itself, thus engaging with VFA‘s uneven industrial history and character.
Text by Livia Lazzarini, Villa Filanda Antonini