VIDEO STILL

PRESENTATION TEXT

LIFT is Myriam Van Imschoot’s first ‘short film’ (Hd, colour, 19‘33”).

For the entire length of the video the camera moves upwards in a long traveling shot, from the ground floor to the top floor alongside the facade of a skyscraper. Shot from close angle, the balconies of the inhabitants come into view, floor after floor. There are hardly any humans.

Notwithstanding the absence and a rigorous approach reminiscent of structural cinema, the world revealed in LIFT is strikingly human. The narrowing of the scope paradoxically opens up to a wide landscape, where architecture, the urban space, and private lives meet.

Objects like outdoors furniture, plants, toys and garbage that ‘populate’ the balconies become the ‘indices’ of the lives of the inhabitants that are removed from view. All the time the city plays its role too, through sound in the sound track and as reflection in the windows of the apartments. Everything is present by way of proxy.

The icon of modernist architecture - the skyscraper - becomes a vehicle to question modes of living together. As the camera keeps moving upwards, higher and higher, the repetition of seeing ‘floor after floor’ transforms into a dazzling sensation and uncanny affect.