HD CAM SR Video, NTSC, Color, Stereo Sound, 20’59”, 16:9
Post Production: Mikko Gaestel
Starring: Henry Wilde
Thank You: Famille Masbou, Marei & Hannes Wendt, Ulrich Baehr, Bettina von Arnim, Isabell Spengler, Daniel Adams, Nanna Heidenreich, Lucile Desamory, Sabine Ercklentz, Andrea Neumann, Arantxa Martinez, William Wheeler, Nicholas Bussmann, Anna Clementi & die Maulwerker, Maria Falconetti & Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Wilde
For Ida, A Self-Portrait is a love video-letter to Ida, shot on videophone (Skype) using a laptop’s internal camera. In the image, we see a quadruplicated face belonging to some kind of man. Through the subtle differences between the micro-choreographic performances of each of these four moving passport photos, diverse surfaces for identification and projection develop. Over the course of their slow and precise transformations, different (drag) identities pass through the four faces. As a “performance for the camera”, the video’s articulation unfolds by sole means of choreographic language, as a solitaire without words, without added time effects or manipulation, and without cuts. For Ida is the filmic-choreographic inverse of the piece For Faces, which is performed live by four “interpreters”. The two works behave as side one and two of the same record: one shouldn’t/can’t see them together. While the “for” in Four Faces stands for the material space of the spectators and the interpretive work of the performers, the “for” in For Ida signifies a space of thought, a space inhabited by a dedication.
„Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because. (…)“
– Gertrude Stein, from “If I Told Him, A Complete Portrait of Picasso”