I’m not going to the ocean, because that’s the shark’s house. But when chickens come into my house, guess what? I have made a career out of that. As a counterargument to Andrea Frasers’ therapeutic setting in her video installation Projection (2008) — we are the butterfly, whose eyes and gaze are divided — mutually activated by the unconscious of the other.
SYNOPSIS
In ANTI PREDATOR ADAPTATION we connect different spaces of representation — the galery, the cinema, and the natural history museum — to an arena of thought, in which we try to survive. Based on Andrea Fraser's video installation Projection (2008) and influenced by a close-reading of The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967/1973) by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, we translate defense mechanism of the world attributed to animals into the psyche. In the core chapter, "Mimicry", the figure of the octopus stands in for the ideal of constant self-transformation. The video reflects on the desire for a fluctuating identity that resists limiting forms of depictions and expectations. In an associative collage of archival material, found-footage, and filmed images we navigate through ambivalences of being and becoming an artist.
— Film premiere 04/2016 Special Mention at Austrian American Short Film Festival (AASFF), Austrian Cultural Forum New York: "for being a philosophical, topical, and fascinating experimental film"
