Maps and Journeys : Screening Two

Leah gave us each an artist to research over an extended lunch break for a presentation and I was given Mariele Neudecker. Born in 1965 in Dusseldorf, Germany, she currently lives and works in the UK. In her work she likes to investigate the formation and historical dissemination of cultural contructs around the natural world, focussing on landscape representations within Northern European romantic tradition and today's notion of the sublime. Her practice aims to show the human interest and relationship to landscape and it's images used metaphorically for human psychology.

In Another Day // Mariele Neudecker

This is the piece that I chose of Neudecker's work to look into that is an example of psychogeography.

In Another Day we see a film of the sun setting and another film of the sun rising simultaneously on either side of a single screen. This supposedly plays the role of the entire world, die to it being shot at the exact same time and at locations diametrically opposite one another. By circling the piece you can have the ability to switch from sunrise to sunset at will, making it seem like we can skip from one end of the world to another in only a few paces. Instincts tell us that going back and forward between the sunset and sunrise represents a protraction of time, while logic insists that the piece represents a protraction of space.  Neudecker gets the point across that someone else's day is just beginning as our own is ending. Despite the cliched status of sunsets and sunrises representing beginnings and endings, perhaps Neudecker wished to unconsciously portray the sense of witnessing the birth and death of our world on each occasion. The result is a profoundly disorientating, yet mesmerising and sorrowful experience.