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  Claudia Aravena Abu-Ghosh
Berlin: been there - to be here
  Germany/Chile 1999/2000
Videotape, 13:00
 
Countless film directors and video artists have tried, with varying success, to produce visual representations of memories. The eye of memory does not view things in the same way as the physical eye, and many an artist has already come to grief over this difference. Abu-Ghosh's attempt belongs to the successes. She has managed to render the fragmentary and associative aspect of memory, the vague rising and subsiding of images, even the feelings which are so much a part of it. In her homeland everyone is suffering from amnesia, says Chilean Abu-Ghosh. She moves to Berlin where she feels like a stranger who is refusing to speak the language. But this city, a place overflowing with history and memory, cures her of her own loss of memory by taking her through a painful process of recovery. It is a process she is unable to prevent, although at first she tries to resist it: the voice-over of her ordinary speaking voice looks for excuses and reassuring explanations; the other voice-over, however, a voice whispering inside her head, refuses to be pacified. This voice whispers searching questions and disturbing inferences touching on things which she has apparently contrived to evade for years. The image of an enormous mechanical grabber pulling down old Berlin dwelling houses is a recurring, ambiguous metaphor. With a rasping din it destroys (places of) memories, razing them to the ground and turning them into deserted plains. But the machine also digs down into the depths, bringing things to the surface. We see a worker ruthlessly breaking open the containers of memory with an electric drill. Slowly but surely the river of memories is allowed to flow in. Vague images shrouded in an aura of grey shift across each other, shadow beings rise to the surface and vanish. The sonorous tones of a synthesizer are sometimes abruptly shattered by the shriek of metal on metal – like knives being sharpened against each other – that reverberates in the head with painful shrillness.

– Lies Holtrop

Editing: Guillermo Cifuentes
Music: Gato Leiras-Wenczel
Translations: Andrea Kottow, Karin Schyle
Production: Podewil & Claudia Aravena Abu-Ghosh

Claudia Aravena Abu-Ghosh ° 1968, Santiago (Chile)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

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