During the filming for the site-specific video performance Der Traum vom Fliegen (The Dream of Flying) a camera was positioned at a height of 15 meters and filmed from a bird’s eye view as a human figure falls through the disused elevator shaft in the Palast der Republik. In the installation, the film projection is directed at the floor, as a virtual extension of the elevator shaft above. The viewers stand on the projection.
»The Dream of Flying: the most ruined form of this millennia-old desire to leave gravity and corporeality behind is what we witness in Berchtold’s installation: by bending towards the floor with a glance into the depths. The deeply rooted associations which flying awakens – transcendence of the pneuma, of the atmosphere, of vertical ascent – have disappeared in Berchtold’s work. At the end of the modern age, all that remains of the mythical-anthropological figure of Daedalus – “the one who comes up with new ideas” – is the fall of “the one who plummets down”. Flying has lost all sense of transcending boundaries, of being able to touch the impossible, and reveals itself in its rawest, least graceful manner, as falling through the air, indeed as falling through time. Isolation in plummeting accompanies contempt for the world and humanity. Berchtold’s installation, however, allows us to accompany this plummet perceptually – and thus still keeps one of art’s promises, one that Vilém Flusser connected with mankind: “Today, people are parachutes which occasionally open for one another.” – A minimal gesture on which, however, almost everything depends.«
Bernd Ternes
Eternal fall
»(…) The successful works in the exhibition play with the challenge of the imagination, which is constantly inventing new images and metaphors in order to banish fear, to depict the inexperiencable, and to provide information about what no reliable news comes to us. In a video installation by Stefan Berchtold, a person falls through a virtual shaft. When we dream of flying, we may experience the fall, but never the impact. Would the state of death be an eternal, never-ending falling without a smashing? (…)«
Jens Bisky
from: At some point, you do want to know,
Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 215, September 17/18, 2005
The Dream of Flying | Floor projection 6x6m, amplifier, speakers, 3:36, loop
Artist Statement:
Some people dream that they fly, some that they fall, and still others dream a combination of both: one dreams that one would fly. In sleep, the conscious mind turns on, »This can’t be. I must be dreaming.« And then one falls.
Here it becomes tangible that real life experiences are forced into comparison in the dream world: even if one has never paraglided, the feeling of floating briefly is familiar from trampolining, for example. For one’s own demise, however, there is no similarly familiar experience. One wakes up (at the latest) shortly before impact.
seen @ Fraktale IV, Palast der Republik Berlin
Photo: Martin Kunze