Revision

Revision establishes a logic of viewing which implies the visitor as a voyeur. The windows and balconies of the building across the street show no people and the space is open to imagination of what happens behind the curtains. However, this logic is immediately undermined. Instead of going into a cinematic narrative of what happens behind closed doors, the building itself takes on the main role. The main characters of the film are set together out of architectual outside elements and inner space. The rhythm of the lights switching on and off in the apartments is supported by the sinister flickering of the street lamp in the space between two buildings: the one projected and the one the visitor is assumed to be standing in. The thriller elements – the flickering of lights, the pumping red light, a bird almost hitting our window – heightens the sense of suspense between the two buildings, involving the visitor into the emotional plane set up by the installation. Revision further goes on both following and undermining its own logic. The rooms behind the windows have come closer creating a paradoxical situation for the viewer: we are still implied as looking out of a window but the window now looks directly into someone else’s interior. When the curtain is drawn, the visitor is thrown back into the exhibition space. But where is one really?

We go through a process of slowly swapping spaces and eventually we changed sides, without ever having moved physically, we look from the outside into the room. A travel as being on a Möbius strip. We are involved in a Kafkian logic: a structure which makes it impossible to take a clear viewpoint. Instead, every clear standpoint is momentary and is a step towards another. A step to a revision.

In all of Julia Willms’ work the architectual space is not a container for life, but a living structure itself. It only exist in interaction with us. There are no static borders between the environment and the ‘I’, there only exists a very thin porous layer, which constantly feeds the other in a two way relationship. Definitions of ourselves as well as of our environment are in a constant exchange and underlie a permanent adjustment and redefinition. There is no standstill, just a continuous gliding. All things are in a permanent movement; and not only the things towards each other, but also the space which gets constructed. One is not in the space but rather one is space.