Fuga 2021
Fuga
3-channel video installation, 7 digitized 16mm b/w films in loop (9:36”) 969cm x 220cm
In the video choreography Fuga, seven people look straight at the viewer; four women, three men, of different ages. Alternately, in surrender, they fall straight ahead and rise again. Sometimes synchronously, sometimes alone. The work emerged from my own longing for surrender, but also from a recurring desire, at times, to disappear, both physically and mentally. In the artistic proces I researched how this desire was stored in my body, and how to transmit this to the audience. With the performers, during a six-week we rehearsed the act of falling, how to convey the feeling of surrender, how to look, how to rise etc ? Each performer has their own fall sequence, individually filmed on 16mm film (in vertical position), the 7 separate films are then composed into one film.
The title of this life-size work refers to the musical form fugue, characterized by polyphony and repetitions. Bach used a seven-part fugue in his Mass, in which resurrection is an important theme. In psychology, fugue has the meaning of suddenly disappearing.
Shown at the exhibition Surrender in Museum Tot Zover in Amsterdam until August 22nd 2021
Performers: Nathalie Smoor, Diego Olieveira, Iris Wiegers, Barbara Klee, Bakir Shawky
Devika Chotoe, Dirk Versluis
Camera and post production: Onno Petersen
Assistant Camera: Walt van der Aar
Made possible by: Cultuurmakersfonds (Prince Bernhard Cultuurfonds). Kickstart Fund, Mondriaan Fund and Museum Tot Zover
Thanks to: Nathalie Smoor and Elmer Leupen
Full review Parool:
This artwork by Roos van Geffen
would not look out of place in the Stedelijk
Maarten Moll, 19 augustus 2021
Only a few days left to see: seven falling figures.
Three men, three women and a girl.
They fall forward.
Get up again.
Fall again.
Eternal, it seems.
It is a work of art by Roos van Geffen and can be seen until Sunday in the large hall of the Tot Zover Museum (Museum So Far) in De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery.
I was reminded of that iconic photo Saut dans le vide (‘Jump into nothing’) in which artist Yves Klein falls from a building on October 23, 1960 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, just south of Paris. And to the gravity performances of Bas Jan Ader.
Fuga is the name of Roos van Geffen’s work.
They just keep falling, those seven figures. When will it stop?
It doesn’t stop, but if you look closely, if you keep watching for about ten minutes, you notice the schnitts, you know it’s loops.
(Subtitle of Fuga: ‘2021. 3-channel video installation, 7 digitized 16mm black and white films on loop (9:36’’).’)
On the entire back wall you see seven times the image of a person who is facing you frontally. They just stand there until they start to fall. Forward.
And then they get up again.
And fall again.
Etc. Etc.
The people are just a bit more than life size, so you are drawn into the images.
Breathtaking. And an almost hallucinatory experience that also brings a lot of peace.
Perhaps because of the idea behind this work.
Fuga, according to Van Dale: ‘Multi-part music in which the theme, introduced by one voice, is successively taken over by the other voices.’ Here, in this museum that deals with life and death, the eternal ups and downs of course stand for that eternal cycle . (Van Geffen also refers to Nietzsche’s Ewige Wiederkunft.)
One does not fall at the command of the artist, but one falls when one wants to fall. Arbitrary. Just as death does not come to order.
Sometimes two fall at once, sometimes three or four. Then again one falls and the rest remains standing.
There is an older man, my favorite, neatly in a suit, whose tie is crooked from the fall. He falls with abandon. From which you may conclude that he has accepted that life is finite.
But even without the thought of the life cycle it is a beautiful work of art. Which you can also just look at and just let your own thoughts loose.
Director Guus Sluiter would like to purchase the work for the museum, but then he would have to give up the main hall, which would in turn be at the expense of all those other beautiful exhibitions that he wants to show (next year there will be one by herman de vries!).
Fuga would not look out of place in the Stedelijk Museum, or any other large museum in the Netherlands.
Last chance, go quickly!
