ABSTRACT. This is an assemblage using the film Four Siblings as a basis to reflect on the notion of the “artist-as-analyst” (Juli Carson) in connection with amateurish practices. These are positioned as performative, as they co-create the family system. The video letters, shot on 8 mm and Super 8 films, were sent from my grandmother, who had emigrated to the United States after the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, to my great-grandmother in Vienna, where the films were developed and watched. During that time three-quarters of all amateur film-makers were men. In the course of Four Siblings' the beautiful images are contrasted with issues of violence, rivalry, and ambivalence. Haunted by last season’s video letters: amateur films performing spectrality is an attempt to poetically map non-linear memory. Spectrality, in its simultaneous presence and absence, is introduced to film media as soon as an archive is set up.
Open exposition in JAR 12
