Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Das Haus deepens the exploration of sculptural architecture that Aglaia Konrad conducted with the series of 16mm films Concrete and Samples. Shot in a house designed by architect Juliaan Lampens in Sint-Martens-Latem (Belgium), the film resumes the artist’s interest on the possibilities of the cinematic medium to generate –rather than capture - an architectural experience. An experience which, in this film, surpasses the visual to mobilize bodily perception and even desire. Konrad’s editing carefully measures the doses of perceptual information it provides to our orientation drive in a process that departs from an initial willingness to orient oneself towards the pleasure of surrendering to disorientation and fragmentation. A disorientation that could be called “perverse” in the sense that Freud bestowed to the word –perverse pleasures are those which linger in the detour; in the resistance to result in a productive goal– insofar as the film replaces the production of a representation of space in favour of perceptive defamiliarization and tactile pleasure. Architecture and film are constantly looking at each other in a piece in which "angle", "transition", "cut", "sequence", "frame", " joint", " fold " and "rhythm" are notions that are spread from one discipline to the other as if the camera and editing would be reading the space as a composition score. There are two architectural comparisons that are often applied to filmmaking: the idea of cinema as a "window" and as “mirror". Das Haus, entangles and complicates those comparisons by treating windows as interfaces that blur the inside and outside and whose transparency acquires materiality, and by using mirrors as devices that disrupt form pushing it to a state of potentiality. In Das Haus the screen is no longer a window but rather a skin: for it is a body interface, a tactile surface and a membrane that is neither safe nor transparent because it reveals its inner cinematic compositional strategies.

Aglaia Konrad is a photography based artist living in Brussels whose work has focused mainly on metropolitan urban space. She has been advising researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and is currently teaching at the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas in Brussels. She had presented her work in solo exhibitions in Siegen, Antwerp, Geneva, Graz, Cologne and New York, among other cities, as well as in international group shows such as Documenta X (1997), Cities on the Move (1998-1999) and Talking Cities (2006). Her work has been documented in several exhibitions catalogues and monographic publications such as 'Elasticity' (2002) and 'Iconocity' (2005). For her book 'Desert Cities' (2008) she received the Infinity award for the best photo book 2009 of the International Center for Photography, New York. The book 'Carrara' (2011) won the Fernand Baudin Prize 2011. Before the trilogy Concrete & Samples (2009-2010) she made the film Sculpture House (2008, 12'05") based on a house built in 1968 around Liège (BE) by Jacques Gillet, Felix Roulin and René Greisch.