In 1984 Austrian performance artist and filmmaker VALIE EXPORT realized the television series The armed eye – VALIE EXPORT in dialogue with the film avant-garde. Excerpts from this experimental mediation format, in which VALIE EXPORT also acts as a moderator, served as base material for a text-based piece of video work.
By transcribing her presentations and fragmenting them into individual words, a new narrative was constructed, which is then recited in the video. By editing the archival material on a very small scale, I was also able to let VALIE EXPORT “speak” my anagrammatic text. The video Im Dialog interweaves these two versions of a lecture.
By doubling a monolouge and linking past and present, I refer to VALIE EXPORT’s idea of a “dialogue with the film-avantgarde”. The text reflects the process of creating the video work, thus explaining itself, but also asking questions: What happened to the ideas of the avant-garde? What is left to say when everything has already been said? And who is actually speaking here?