Duration 12`40” Splits screens
In their video "Isle of White“ Antje Feger and Benjamin F. Stumpf explore inner and outer borders which are especially sensible in the living conditions of refugees. In Spring 2010 they travelled to different places along the German-Danish border and on smuggling paths between both countries to research into these places in re-gard to the view of immigrants. In their final video the research is mostly indirectly tangible. It shows the mental situation, the har-assment and affliction of a refugee. The experience and suffering is sublimated into atmospherically condensed scenes that are par-allelized with landscape images. Instead of documentary imagery the film works with the forcefulness of the action and the atmo-sphere of the landscapes. This shows that “Isle of White” does not only refer to the specific border between Germany and Denmark, not only to specific places like isolated accommodations and not only to the present. Moreover, the winter landscape becomes a metaphor for human coldness and the anonymous character of a refugee becomes an image of the basic, existential experience of bondage, homelessness, coldness and harassment. |
