The concept '[Mellemværende]', which translates into English as 'intercourse', means among other things an exchange of views, or a dispute between parties from which no conclusions can yet be drawn, and to which no meaning may yet be ascribed. By means of a layering technique, Ruge images the field of tension between representations and words in a series of twelve fragments and, within that, the zone of conflict between images and words in relation to each other. The individual fragments are confined either to words or to images; the word 'Mellemværende' vanishes after the title, leaving an empty space between the brackets. Two voices are heard in conversation about a third person; they address this third person. The conversations are interspersed with images in black and white. A mattress, lifted by the wind on one of its sides, strikes the feet of a fallen chair. The empty space between the parentheses at the beginning of each vocal fragment betokens the impossibility of characterizing that fragment. Although the voices speak of violence, of the murder of the third person and of love, dreams and insanity, there is a total absence of an emotionality that might enable us to attach a sense to what is being spoken. This absence increases the tension, but it also intensifies our alienation. A woman's voice announces the next visual fragment. The 'title' that appears on the screen is, again, without specific meaning. The snarling and crackling of synthetically produced sounds suggest a violent dispute between the objects on the screen: the mattress strikes the chair-legs, a plank slams against a tree. The voices do not refer to the images, and vice versa. The rigorous composition of the video suggests meaning and awakens in the spectator the expectation of a final surplus of meaning from the relationship of the individual parts to each other. However, it is as though Ruge wishes to acquaint us with a frame that is constantly switching between a culture of words and a culture of images. This may strike us as logical enough. But the effect of her simple intervention is to make it rather less obvious and organic than you might have first thought.
– Loek Stolwijk |
Ane Mette Ruge, 1955 (Denmark)
Lives and works in Kopenhagen (Denmark)
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