German video artist and photographer Corinna Schnitt will be our guest at this year's Images Festival, alongside our artist-in-residence Isabell Spengler. This marks Schnitt's return to Toronto after her Goethe-Institut exhibition "What Dreams Are Made of“ 12 years ago. This spring, our partner
Vtape will show her recent video "Ball Spielen". I caught up with Corinna Schnitt before her arrival in Canada for her opening on April 10:
Jutta Brendemühl: In Toronto this spring, you will be showing your 2013 short film “Playing Ball”, filmed at the historic abandoned Michigan Theater in Detroit. Why Detroit, and what was your particular perspective on the space?
Corinna Schnitt: I am really interested in public and urban spaces in general,
how a place was meant to be used and how differently it actually might be used in the end. Detroit is a city that really interests me. In this case the theatre has been used as a parking garage since the 70s. I like this pragmatic social solution: There is lack of parking and no demand for a theatre (that was build back in the years of silent movies with space for a whole orchestra).
JB: “Playing Ball” could be a documentary -- if it wasn’t for a man and a woman, dressed for work, playing basketball in the space. Why anchor —or dislocate— these (already curiously staged) protagonists in a theatre-turned-parking lot?
What is the interplay between architecture and social action in your work?
CS: Looking around the theatre, I found a basketball net.
It had been installed years ago, and people seem to have used it for lunch break games. So the theatre transforms into a garage, the garage is also used as play area for professionals on their break. Of course it's only in my imagination that they are dressed in fancy business attire that seems inappropriate for playing together. Instead of chatting, they are playing ball.
JB: You have been a photographer as well as a filmmaker for more than two decades and originally trained as a carver. In 2003 at the Goethe-Institut Toronto you showed "What Dreams Are Made of“, a photo series showing suburban houses, as well as your video works to date. How do you decide between moving or static image for a project? Or is the format decision already intrinsically there when you choose a theme or space? What do you feel you can express better in moving images, what in photography?
CS: Sometimes the photos are another outcome of a video project, sometimes it just has to be only photography. Some projects that might be first thought of as film might end up as just one photo.
In a photo, the aspect of what was before and after the image was taken can be really important. It can be interesting in that it only gives you a hint of a crazy scene, but you don't get the whole narrative.
JB: You are spending over a month in Canada and the USA right now. Any plans to develop new work during your travels?
CS: I just finished a new video on nature. It's purely beautiful and not very intellectual, a very long close-up dolly shot through grass and greenery. At the same time I was researching an internet phenomenon called ASMR, autonomous sensory meridian response, meaning a pleasurable tingling sensation to sensory stimuli. I asked different ASMR artists to whisper to flowers for me. And there is a connection between the two projects. But when I travel, I don't work on a new project but try to relax.
Corinna Schnitt, born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1964, is a German filmmaker, producer and photographer. She started out with an apprenticeship as a Wood carver and continued to study at the Academy for Visual Communication in Offenbach and the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Since 2009 she has been as a professor for film and video at the University of Art in Braunschweig. Schnitt has created a series of short experimental films in which daily phenomena are pushed to the limit to the effect that the videos develop an absurd, sad but at the same time humorous sketch of our society. Her best-known works include “Out of your clothes” (1999), “The sleeping girl” (2001), “Living a beautiful life” (2004) and “Ball playing” (2013). She has received various awards for her work, among them two German Film Awards.
by
Jutta Brendemühl
