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Patrick Topitschnig

Carusel

Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 5:41 | Autriche, Roumanie | 2015

With precisely composed filmic-tableaux and through minimal movements the work Carusel evokes the image of a post-apocalyptic playground, while somewhere outside or above various doomsday scenarios take their course. It is a setting of the Zeitgeist-phenomenon celebrated by our pop culture in graphic novels, computer games and television series in all of its enjoyment and pessimism. Carusel triggers trails of thought in-between mythical traditions and actual fear of the dark. In an elevator ride in one of the sequences, we eavesdrop a conversation of a family: Arguably, the rest of the world still standing. Carusel was shot in the damp caverns of a former Romanian salt mine which was reused as a bomb shelter in the second world war and is now refurbished as an erie underground amusement park. Though equipped with a carousel, ping-pong tables, a childrens’ playground and rowboats, the combination with large threatening steel structures and surreal light-objects still produce a gloomy atmosphere and ambience of fear. It seems that the mythical echos of the historically charged site are still abound, yet absurdly translated into an uncanny and bizarre „amusement park“. Marlies Wirth

Patrick Topitschnig is a Vienna based filmmaker and audio artist and also collaborates on theatre projects. After he finished his studies in Commercial Information Technology he studied Intermedia Art and Narrative Film in Vienna and Berlin under the likes of Bernhard Leitner, Erwin Wurm, Constanze Ruhm and Thomas Arslan. For his diploma in 2012 he produced the experimental video “Right to Hospitality”. He received several awards, such as the Fred Adelmueller Grant and the Ursula Blickle Preis for his video "Concision of the Whole" (2007) ("Zerschneidung des Ganzen"). In 2013 he was granted the STARTstipendium for video and media art (Austrian Federal Ministry for Culture and Arts). He works primarily with video and sound, often within installative contexts. His works center on direct physical experience and immediate reception of time, as well as on enduring and measuring the passing of time on a visual or on an acoustic basis. Permanent repetitions or continuous oscillations constitute a recurrent theme.