35mm, 2 min, 2018

“Five… four… three… two… one,” chants an older man into the microphone. He replaces the obligatory unspoken “zero” of the countdown with a dynamic backward twist of his upper body. The point of his finger, which twists backward with him, provokes a change in the shot to reveal the view of a bulging baroque dust cloud being sucked inside a building by a nearly unstoppable force, from which, in a din, an imposing structure in its entire, undamaged splendor emerges. This process occurs five times altogether from various perspectives and distances. One seems reminded of the legendary explosion at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, but with a decisive difference:  Viktoria Schmid re-demolishes. Her working material comprises private recordings from viewers who witnessed the demolition of the building parts of the Eastman Kodak company complex in Rochester and published their self-filmed documentary clips onto YouTube. Many of them had worked in the factory, which makes them witnesses to the destruction of their former workplace. Viktoria Schmid compiled the clips and played them backwards. In the regenerative movement, the implosion turns into an act of constituting. And thus, the reducing to rubbles of the building parts becomes a spectacular reconstruction, accompanied by the amazed shouts of the audience (“WOW” is the palindrome of the moment!). In this way, using digital means, a party-like tribute is paid to the glorious resurrection of the factory for color-sensitive analogue film.  (Text: Melanie Letschnig)

Exhibition view: The remains of cinema, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, 2018, Photo: Markus Krottendorfer