Ter Heijne combines images of private worlds with the public space of the media that provide us daily with pictures and bulletins about the misery on this planet. You navigate through somewhat childishly looking drawings of transit halls, baggage depots, encampments and fantasy worlds. In each QuickTime VR 'environment' (360-degree spaces) there are 'hot spots' (clickable items) that allow you to visit other spaces. These hot spots are sometimes cut from photos of people looking like something from the news, sometimes they're drawings of doors and windows or mysterious holes in the sketched décor. If you click on the figures, an often horrible image from the media will briefly appear. War, famine, ruthlessly suppressed uprisings, police brutality, upheaval, natural disaster and other hardships. Enormous human misery. Even the sound makes it abundantly clear that this concerns the sorts of things the media exposes us to every day in terms of horror and madness that leaves us powerless. Other places provide access to new spaces that also consist of media cut-outs. The transitions are alternately animated using dissolves. Here and there, the navigation is confusing. You seem to be stuck and keep returning to the space you just left. Perhaps unintentionally, the oppressiveness that comes with this fits well with the oppressiveness of being starkly confronted with the world's misery. Channel hopping in front of the TV is a good deal simpler; you are forced to allow the theoretically familiar images to get inside your head. In a number of places the space is reserved for the integrated showing of TV/video images like the chemical genocide by Sadam Hussein, police brutality in South Africa, natives fleeing in Vietnam and the crisis in Yugoslavia. In fact, you navigate through this collection of images without being aware of an end or a beginning either.
– Willem van Weelden |
Technical design: Uwe Boek
Sound: Remco Vlaanderen, Mathilde ter Heijne
Mathilde ter Heijne, 1966, Straatsburg (France)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)
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