Mees Bergshoeff

An installation that looks like its just made for us to meet.

A film performance, that came about by pressure and intuition, and maybe some serendipity. Having all the ingredients to create a film: An archive, a story and a melancholic sound. But a resistance to make it into something that will exist in one form, that will be unable to evolve in its time. 

Through being captured, filmed, watched and seen, something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage which range from the crudely chronological order of snapshot and information, storage in our heads, sequences pasted in family albums, the internet and personal film rolls stored on our phones. They become the dogged accumulations and meticulous filing needed for our memories to store. Images that are reproduced are used to map our personal lives. Captures do more than redefine the stuff of ordinary experience (people, things, events, whatever we see - albeit differently, often inattentively - with natural vision) and add melancholic meaning that we will never see at all. Reality as such is redefined - Identity is constructed - as an item for exhibition in our own mind, as a record for scrutiny, as a target for surveillance of our memory. The visual exploration and duplication of the world fragments continuities and feeds the pieces into an interminable dossier, a black box; our thoughts.

An archive is there to create a timeline of numerous facts, tries to make sense of what’s there, it’s a collection of catalogued artifice. But what is missing? What is the unrecorded, the non captured, the back of the camera, the emotional worth of an image?

How I want to propose this performance of a self reflection of being rather lost in a place, is through a self archive, that is bound without a physical place. A digital archive of the self. A scattered and rhizomatic archive, that sometimes makes sense and sometimes not. A collection of first hand images, the eye of the writer that is seeing and looking. A way of ordering the ideas into a kind of non-order. Accompanied with a text, that conflicts and speak about this gap in the archive and our construction of it, narrated by the person who’s way we see in front of our eyes. 

There is so much unsaid, unsayable, but translated for the person that sees the picture. 

A performance that might make magic, or might just miss in that moment.