Three simple little stones play the leading parts in 'Re:location'. Little stones found by Hooykaas and Stansfield in a copper mine in the south of Spain, and followed on an imaginary journey in this triptych. The beginning is the place where the stone is picked up from the ground, and we then see pictures of the surroundings, and of people filming and photographing this environment. Each part ends at the place that the stone has come to occupy in memory: in human memory – symbolized by distorted images of the quarry projected onto a head – or in artificial memory, from photo album to museum repository. Each part of the set of three is similar in structure, and certain pictorial elements also reappear in other parts. In this respect, 'Re:location' displays the characteristics that have come to be the trademark of the films, videos, installations and CD-ROMs made by the Hooykaas and Stansfield duo over the past twenty-five years: unassuming images just slipping calmly by. Cyclically expiring stories in pictures, without linear development, without dramatic climaxes. Thematically too, this video refers to their earlier work. Like their earlier films from the seventies 'Re:location' stresses the indissoluble bond between nature and techné .And exactly as in their CD-ROM 'Person to Person', which carried off the Grand Prix of New Media last year, they pose the question of what happens to a place when you take away a souvenir of it – whether this be a little stone, a photograph or an image carried as a reminiscence. Have you, in this case, stolen something from the place; did you leave behind you an emptiness of some kind? And what about when you display your souvenir in another place. How does all this relate to the original?
– Anne van Driel |
Madelon Hooykaas, 1942, Maartensdijk (Netherlands)
Elsa Stansfield, 1945, Glasgow (United Kingdom)
Live and work in Amsterdam (Netherlands)
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