2006
Playstation: fedaluna is a video work which reflects upon play, and on aging in connection with a fulfilled, creative, thoroughly successful life, a life that attained this state through a combination of determination, openness, physical and intellectual discipline, continuous practice and appropriation, as well as poetic imagination, but also through self-imposed restrictions and sacrifice.
Like Siegerehrungen (Award Ceremonies), here it is a question of body politics, success, memory, and honor. Except that this time, the interest of the two artists is not focused on a single dimension, on one moment of recollection, which, in connection with the body, stands for a complex metaphor concerning the contexts and phases of life. Instead, we are immersed in a netlike biographical web, one that expands playfully and associatively into memory fragments.
Once again, the action takes place in a swimming pool, a setting which substitutes for a stage: the pool is a model that was designed and built by the then 16-year-old dancer, choreographer, and dance instructor Fe Reichelt, who is now eighty years old. This model accompanied her throughout her long life, and today occupies a place of honor in her apartment, which is populated by numerous small dolls of the most various types.
The artist films Fe Reichelt‘s hands as she choreographs with the dolls, practices with them, manipulates them, tells stories about her ancestry and origins and relates these to her own recollections. The result is a web composed of imaginative, real, absurd and normal actions and stories, which revolve as a whole around the everyday, around fantasy, bodily experience, the production of meaning, desire, and balancing practice.
Fe Reichelt works with her body, and is a teacher who conveys her insights – but not only to those who want to become dancers. Through Play Station, we receive exercise playing: to be a child and to be old are not to very far distant, for these are times of life when people do not necessarily need to be “productive”, when play is permitted. In this teaching dialogue, the curtain is closed at the back, the outside world is shut out: this presentation is not intended for a successand competition-oriented society.
installations