Einfache Projektionen

EINFACHE PROJEKTIONEN is changing neighbourhoods for its last edition: ESSAIS (2020, 42 min., 45 sec.) by Hannes Schüpbach will be shown from the 4th to the 27th of February, also through a shop window, at Vonwilstrasse 5.

In his latest film, ESSAIS, Hannes Schüpbach explores movements and the transition from one to another. The filmmaker observes seven befriended creatives and researchers, and captures their habitus, their idiosyncratic movements and gestures. The central protagonist is dancer Kira Blazek. The film is edited in such a way that her experimental sequences of movements enter into a dialogue with the film’s other actors. The unifying element is her inner urge to try things out. Schüpbach accompanies Stephen Watts, Eléonore Bernard, Heba-Raphaëlle Meffre, Flurin Cuonz, Marco Baschera and Jiajia Zhang with his camera. Alongside movement, clothing also plays a key role in ESSAIS: With different tops and with her face concealed, Kira Blazek acts out new possibilities in dance. Heba-Raphaëlle Meffre uses clothing for a sensual entranced masquerade. And it serves Jiajia Zhang as an extension of her arms’ movements.

The projection of ESSAIS constitutes a multiple parenthesis for EINFACHE PROJEKTIONEN: This format began in February 2021 with Hannes Schüpbach’s films VERSO and CONTOUR at Linsebühlstrasse 25, and now concludes with ESSAIS at Vonwilstrasse 5. Via Jiajia Zhang, Linsebühl is also present here: Schüpbach filmed this artist in her flat on Lämmlisbrunnenstrasse, the same flat where the view from the window formed the film UNTITLED (LOOP LINSEBÜHL), which she shot together with Jiri Markovec for EINFACHE PROJEKTION #3.

EINFACHE PROJEKTION #7 arose from the possibility to make temporary use of the shop at Vonwilstrasse 5, which was a fabric shop until the end of 2021.

EINFACHE PROJEKTIONEN #6 offers a new film genre: The projected short film AIRPORT (2017) by Michaela Müller is based on glass painting. It comprises over 5,000 individual images, which were painted on glass using gouache and glycerine, then digitally photographed and assembled as a sequence. 

AIRPORT is about atmospheres at airports, those highly regimented places of transit between cities and continents, where everyone is close together but very separate. We see and hear crowds rushing to the gates on moving walkways, displays transforming into countless pictogram-like people with suitcases, and illuminated panels hazily advertising perfumes. Haste, anonymity, a glut of impressions and finally the rapid pulse of a scanned individual showing signs of stress. One of the first announcements to be heard in AIRPORT is: “Please have your passport and boarding pass ready, thank you!” In Müller’s short film, the airport reveals itself to be not a place of wanderlust but of exclusion, an impassable barrier for those who do not have the appropriate passport.

The projection of AIRPORT is the last in the EINFACHE PROJEKTIONEN series of projections at Linsebühlstrasse 25. What tipped the scales in favour of showing Michaela Müller’s animated film here were the parallels regarding both speed of movement and constriction. The latter is expressed corporeally in AIRPORT, as well as via the dense street situation at Linsebühlstrasse 25, where the film’s soundscape blends with that of the busy street at the shop window. AIRPORT makes reference to migration, barriers and the lack of rights for those travelling without papers. Linsebühl is a diverse neighbourhood, home to people of very different origins – including undocumented migrants. For them, everyday life also means constant uncertainty.

Website Michaela Müller

As people walk past Linsebühlstrasse 25, the sounds of soft clattering and pop come from inside. The video Current Issues by Sylvie Fleury blends with the soundscape of the bustling busy street. Close-ups of a hand leafing through fashion magazines alternate with street shots, showing the same sequence over and over again: A sports car drives up, a man gets out, he opens the boot, takes out a roll of paper, stands beside the car, unrolls the paper, holds it up to the camera, then rolls it up again and speeds away with tyres screeching. A cut follows – and the act of leafing through magazines recommences. The handwritten placards, in black on white, show elliptical phrases like BE AMAZING, DARE TO BE DIORIFIC, CLASSICS ARE BLACK or A REVOLUTION IN ARTIFICIAL NAILS: fragmentary word groups that can also be found in the fashion magazines themselves and simultaneously provide for women’s (self-)fulfilment.

Within the art scene, which Fleury has been an indispensible part of since the 1990s, her position is a feminist one. This artist has succeeded in transferring the consumer world and its glamour to the art world, while constantly remaining subversive.

The digitised VHS from 1997 makes reference to an earlier use of this shop: In 1937, Linsebühlstrasse 25 was home to DAMEN SALON, a hairdressing salon. Thus, the scenes in Current Issues refer not only to the exterior and the busy street, but also to the interior: Everyone is familiar with reaching for a fashion magazine when visiting a hairdresser, of which there are several in Linsebühl.

Einfache Projektion #4 revolves around modernist architecture. A series of photos by Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), who used photography as a means of closely following the early years of the Bauhaus in Dessau, is projected. The School of Arts and Crafts, with its iconic ensemble of buildings, was constructed in 1925 and 1926 according to plans by architect Walter Gropius. Moholy photographed the shell of the studio building, providing a view of the steel skeleton before the curtain-wall glass facade was added to it. The series also includes the masters’ houses with their captivating interiors, in which the Bauhaus teachers and their families lived, surrounded by a pine forest. In addition, Moholy produced impressive portraits of female protagonists who had shaped the school but often remained in the shadow of the men – such as painter Lily Hildebrandt, cabinetmaker Eva Fernbach and textile artist Anni Albers. With her photographs, Lucia Moholy has shaped the visual image of the Bauhaus to this day. By projecting her photos, the curators counter St Gallen’s male-dominated modernist architecture with a confident female gaze.

Due to the embroidery crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, very few buildings were constructed in St Gallen at that time. The building that houses the shop in which Einfache Projektionen can be seen at irregular intervals throughout 2021 is St Gallen’s main representative of that era’s so-called New Objectivity style: The Linsebühl building, a complex between Linsebühlstrasse and Lämmlisbrunnenstrasse, was constructed between 1930 and 1933 by architect Moritz Hauser. It could not have broken away from art-nouveau St Gallen any more markedly: cubic forms, a white plastered facade incorporating the course of the street, a flat roof, roof terraces and corner windows – the Linsebühl building exhibits all the stylistic features of New Objectivity.

The 18 photographs by Lucia Moholy belong to the Fotostiftung Schweiz collection. © 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich

Jiajia Zhang and Jiri Makovec have been living in Linsebühl for several years, on the seventh floor of a residential high-rise on Lämmlisbrunnenstrasse, built at the end of the 1950s by architects Otto Glaus, Heribert Stadlin and Willi Schuchter. Here, Linsebühl adopts a metropolitan appearance. The view out of the window reveals an extensive streetscape that has repeatedly found its way into the imagery of Zhang and Makovec.
For Einfache Projektion #3 the artists merged their footage from the neighbourhood: Gathered over the span of a few years and on a recent afternoon walk, casually recorded to be assembled and re-assembled. A circular loop in the Linsebühl provided all the material: banal and dramatic, cinematic, mysterious and from the everyday. 

«Looking through windows into windows, into mirrors onto screens. Eyes meet eyes, in rooms and past lives. Frame by frame, a throw, air, snow. The change of season, the shift from day to night. Joyful dancing and the slow decay of the day. Ascending moon, ‘night’ in daylight. Portrayed by former residents, performed by princes, ghosts and future agents. Found language fictionalises place and still stays local. Inside is the new outside and any place is made up of hybrids. Screening in September through the window for the passers-by.» – Jiajia Zhang

Website Jiajia Zhang
Website Jiri Markovec

Einfache Projektion #2 shows the film Presto, Perfect Sound (2006, 6 min.) by Dutch video artist Manon de Boer. For this film, violinist George van Dam played a sonata by Hungarian composer Béla Bartok six times in a row. De Boer filmed the violinist and recorded the sound. She then asked him to take the sound sequences that he thought were the best from the six recordings and to assemble the piece from them, as one perfect recording. Afterwards, De Boer matched the visual layer to the sound. While the soundtrack now runs continuously, the visual layer is interspersed with cuts that are as hard as they are unexpected. In Presto, Perfect Sound, Manon de Boer breaks away from the traditional dominance of image over sound in film. At the same time, by focusing on the violinist’s face without changing the framing during the course of the film, she gives his emotions a lot of space while he plays.  

Presto, Perfect Sound makes direct reference to the shop at Linsebühlstrasse 25 and to what it is used for: Christopher Lüthi has been running a violin-making studio here on Tuesdays for over 25 years. In Linsebühl, Manon de Boer’s film can be perceived in two ways: purely visually from across the street, or acoustically, by pressing an ear on the outside of the shop window so the sound from inside reaches it. The situation that the film thus creates is almost like the Tuesdays when the violin maker is present: His customers come to pick up the instruments and often spend a few moments producing sounds with them – visible through the shop window, but not always audible.  

With its calm and subtle visual language, Presto, Perfect Sound provides a counterpoint to the urban, busy and noisy street Linsebühlstrasse.  

Manon de Boer lives and works in Brussels. In her films, she works with experimental musicians, dancers or actors and thematises levels of perception, along with their fractures and interconnections.

With many thanks to Manon de Boer (Auguste Orts), Christopher Lüthi, Bastian Lehner and the city and tha canton of St. Gallen.

Filmmaker Hannes Schüpbach starts it off with two films: VERSO (2008) and CONTOUR (2011). The former is a cinematic approach to his father. A glance into the shop at Linsebühlstrasse 25 shows the father – he reads, drinks coffee or dozes, he looks at the landscape and at things, the trees dance in the wind and he goes wandering. In CONTOUR, individual shots from SPIN (2001) and VERSO are now interwoven. We are given brief insights into the lifeworlds of both mother and father, repeatedly interrupted with frames of black, in rapid succession. The individual images slide out of control. In CONTOUR, the altered montage creates a more abstract visual language: Colours and forms are layered, contours become blurred.

«[...] Schüpbach’s films operate on a level that can be compared to the dream or trance.» – Maya Naef, in: Film as Corporeal Exposition, 2012.

In the vicinity of the VERSO and CONTOUR projections, a very wide variety of residential and living situations resonate in the background: Glimpses into flats in the Linsebühl building, built between 1930 and 1933, are fleeting in nature – much like the film’s short scenes. Due to Covid-19, a large portion of our lives currently takes place in private. Schüpbach’s two films bring it back into the public space.

Hannes Schüpbach was already represented in the second edition of stadtprojektionen, which took place in the Linsebühl neighbourhood in 2017: SPIN (2001), a portrait of his mother, was shown in a closed perimeter block development. VERSO and CONTOUR now conclude Hannes Schüpbach’s trilogy in Linsebühl.