With this project my aim is to explore how the complexities of being (or being suspended) in time find a visual form through already existing documents and footages. Rather than thinking of suspension as a negative reference point - as absence or standstill - mode for suspension is set to reveal the insignificance of the context and become a useful way of thinking about independence and global objectives.
Experiment.
By taking the archive materials of the monument relocation in Tallinn and reassembling the footage*, the video essay involves two projections set side-by-side - a fictional world. This fiction exists in the realm of possible as the video assemblage offers no narrative allegory or a clear statement nor is it a documentary of the “truth”. Though clearly set in historically different times, no context or explanation is given. The events are hinted at but not grounded on substance. More than trying to prove a point, the split screen format rejects completeness, singularity and instead can be seen as confronting opinions. Its doubled image announces multiplicity but it feels in-complete. The gaps between and within the frames operate in the realm of the virtual. Rather than defined by a single narrative, or by clarity of the events and facts, the video aims to reveal a nonrepresentational “charged” environment. Though there are hardly any spoken or written words in the video, the viewer nevertheless experiences semiotic complexities of the narrative. The image and sound are here and there, now and then, delinked and feel out of sync; therefore the habitual modes of viewing are challenged. If this was not already enough… Without any facts or explanations, it takes time to comprehensibly follow the story. Just at the moment when the viewer feels engaged, getting a grasp of the timeline, the video ends, leaving open-ended questions. In fact, the video lasts just under twelve minutes – an average time for a daily news program.
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The video, based on the footage of the relocation of the monument in Tallinn, raises questions of causality, space-time continuum and synchronicity. Inspired by Jung’s transfixed idea that life is not just a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order (something that Wolfgang Pauli calls ‘unus mundus’), the video is set to reveal the insignificance of the context. It no longer matters whether the event took place in Tallinn and is entitled as a memory war between Estonians and Russians; or in Iran or Southeast Turkey. Instead of being another representation of the political event, another added layer, mode for suspension investigates the core structure of the original. Through cyclic pattern of the assembled footage, the event in Tallinn escapes its chronological substance (from A to B), and instead is treated as a landscape of knowledge. Mode for suspension, set in a void between state and sovereign power, is a useful way of thinking about global objectives and independence.
