This video offers a short and stormy trip along the border between body/life on the one hand and nature/death on the other. The accompanying music, from the second CD of the Swiss band Knut & Silvy, tells of the longing to lift this border. Images of legs and trees, flashes of skin stretched over ribs and rapid, shocking images of flowers and leaves. With her nakedness in hallucinating stroboscopic lights, nature shows an unattractive side of the contorted body. Naked legs, with the kneecap visibly tensed up, the toes bent, give expression to submission and resistance. The absorbing trip-hop music with its slow, squelchy rhythm leads however to the inescapable lifting of the border. A clawing hand is the inevitable invitation which cannot be avoided or repelled. The blood-red colour saturating the image of a woman, and associative flashes from the horror-movie repertoire hardly give the opportunity to escape a sinister ending. The naked belly with the navel as the cord to life moves slowly as in a last dance in the threatening light of approaching danger. Whether the video tells of a coming or recurring disaster is left unresolved, whereby – in the latter case – the sense of inevitability is even more oppressive.
– Loek Stolwijk
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Music: Knut & Silvy, Production: Video & Film 62
Beat Brogle, ° 1964, Basel Switzerland)
Philipp Schmid, ° 1962, Basel (Switzerland)
Live and work in Basel (Switzerland)
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