Pièce de cinéma - Ines Lechleitner
Ines Lechleitner’s Pièce de cinéma comprises images, sound and text which follow Isabelle Oglivie, a young mentally handicapped woman who is engaged in making a film. Lechleitner, as Isabelle’s assistant as well as her chronicler, accompanies Isabelle as she discusses her film project with filmmakers, artists and philosophers, and documents her approaches to image-making and language. Through ten chapters, each of which comprises an audio segment, a printed text and a series of photographs, Pièce de cinéma approaches the absent film medium, as well as photography, drawing, and language, in a protean meditation on representation and image-making.

Pièce de cinéma is a portrait of Isabelle Oglivie and of her absent film, but structurally it functions by de-constructing the medium of film itself. While film has the capacity to unite disparate media – the photographic, the verbal and the audio – Lechleitner has carefully combed the synaesthesia of film into individual strands. The viewer listens to the audio on headphones while turning the corresponding pages of the book where text and photograph interact. The text, in turn, meticulously charts not just the recorded conversations between Isabelle and her interlocutors, but also the ambient and environmental sounds such as rain, bells, cats, cars and strangers in the street. The words are positioned both across and up and down the strata of the page like a musical score, with each sound strain written in its own register.

Listening, watching and reading, however, the viewer begins to notice that the precise correspondence between word, text and image is illusory: the notation of the text occasionally slips and elides a sound that the ear hears; the images, sometimes functioning as a companion to the text, just as frequently magnify an unnoticed detail of the unseen recorded scene. And, while at moments the photographs continue Isabelle’s word-play and associations, at others they provide us with empty rooms, an abandoned chair, the objects Isabelle has seen: views that are fragments of another angle of the represented moment, or indeed show a slightly different moment altogether, the chair just vacated, its pillows still warm. This fragmentary quality serves to gently remind the viewer of our mediated experience, ellipses that come to stress the shifting incompletion at the core of our experience of others as well as our presentation of ourselves.

Text: Eleanor Atwood Gibson

Specifications
2007 - French (English) - 72 pp. (16 pp.) - 25,5 x 20,5 cm — hard cover — full colour, b&w illustrations
CD - 20’48”
Compilation and design: Ines Lechleitner

Published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL

ISBN 978-90-72076-33-5

€ 32,-

Puzzle Box - Ines Lechleitner
Puzzle box is based on observations of a group of western lowland gorillas living in a zoo in Germany. Studies in the form of photographs, videos and drawings were conducted over a period of five years.

Contents:

– Booklet containing 17 photographs of a group of western lowland gorillas, photographed between 2004 and 2009

– DVD containing two video studies of the same gorilla group:
‘Movement and positions in space’, 5:10 min. (2006)
‘Entering and leaving the frame’, 19:50 min. (2009)

– ‘Space/Positions/Movements’, a map of the relationship between the gorilla’s habitat and the videos and photographs

– Collection of texts by writers from various disciplines in response/relation to the above material

Puzzle box is modeled after ‘Beschäftigungskästen’, which were designed specifically for apes as an interactive occupation and recreation tool. The apes are expected to learn how to manipulate grains inside the box by pushing them from one level to the next in order to gain access to the food.

“It is a well-established thesis that the production of nature in the zoo involves at least just as much what people call ‘cultural objects’ as what we might describe as ‘natural subjects’. But one can certainly go one step further and argue that by putting animals on the stage the zoo makes them part of its constructed landscape, of its material culture. Zoo animals are both ‘natural’ individuals and artefacts and can thus be perceived as hybrid objects, as “artificial animals” that are partly natural entities and partly embodied manifestations of cultural ideas and concepts.” (excerpt from text by Christina Wessely) 

Specifications:
2009 - English - box 33 x 26,5 x 3 cm
part 1: booklet images - 48 pp. - 25 x 32,5 cm - duo tone illustrations
part 2: map - 65 x 100 cm - full colour
part 3: dvd “Movement and positions in space” 5’10” (2006) and “Entering and leaving the frame” 19’50” (2009)
part 4: booklet text - 16 pp.
Edition: 500, Texts: Anthony Auerbach, Frances Bartkowski, Vinciane Despret, Saara Hacklin, Jan Hein Hoogstad, Lucia Di Iorio, Erika Ruonakoski, Mélisandre C. Schofield, Marianne Sommer, Frans de Waal, Bernard Wallner, Christine Wessely, Markus Wild, Photographs, video and map: Ines Lechleitner, Design: Ines Lechleitner and Jayme Yen, Production: Jo Frenken

Published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL)

ISBN: 978-90-72076-37-3

€ 18