Catalogue > At random

In Hollywood's epic stories from the Wild West have inspired an alienating role-playing universe somewhere out in today's Swedish wilderness. Here, a large group of freedom-loving people dressed in cowboy boots and Stetson hats get together in a re-enactment of a past that was never theirs. Fiction and reality meet in Rendezvous, but only in front of the camera. The participants collectively inhabits their simulation, and as long as they can sustain it together, they can safely live it out. It is all about escaping the modern world with its technology and morals, and instead finding the essential and authentic life. That this life can be expressed through fiction is the paradox that Ernst Skoog examines in a film, whose grainy and found footage-like aesthetics are the products of Skoog's concept. Rendezvous is shot on DV video - an already antiquated format - which adds a disorienting temporal distance between the images and what they represent. An antithesis to the Hollywood that their world is modelled upon.

Ernst Skoog was born 1991 in Kvidinge, Sweden and currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Skoog graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2020. Working as both an artist and filmmaker his work centers around moving imagery. In his work he investigates and inhabits the overlap between reality, memory and fiction, and explores perceptions and nuances within them. Rendezvous is Skoog’s debut as a director, the film was nominated for Next:Wave Award and premiered at CPH:DOX in 2020.