A man moves through the darkness; a single body, multiple identities – a schizophrenic appearance, both present and absent, visible and invisible, in a constant movement of destruction and reconstruction. Time is not experienced as a continuum, but as an incessant present, as if there were no past or future left, no outside world, nothing but movement. Whereas the camera focuses more and more on the face, the body becomes a hybrid visualization of the media-saturated, post-modern era, characterized by fragmentation and technological alienation – the body as a kaleidoscope for the psychosomatic self.
Dance: Bruno Marin / Music: Rob(u)rang / Production: Quoi d'Autre asbl, with the support of the Ministry of the French-speaking community of Belgium – Directorate-General for Culture - Visual Arts department
First Prize in the Dancing the Screen competition, Stuttgart, Germany, October 2005
The stroboscopic trilogy
This triptych (2003 - 2005) continues De Bemels’ videographic exploration of movement, dance and the body with the aid of the stroboscope effect, which consists of alternating various video sequences frame by frame. This way a shattered perception of time, space and movement is created. The bodies on the screen seem to be made up of various layers, each enclosed in a time and space dimension of their own. This technique doesn’t merely generate an embodiment of the post-industrial body, which is more and more subjected to de- and re-construction as well as to infinite multiplication and alteration, but is also a metaphor of the post-modern identity: fragmented and ambiguous, schizophrenic and heterogeneous, in a constant state of flux. After all, in a society dominated by consumerism, cybernetics, mass culture and global media, the notion of identity seems to dissolve in an incessant mutation and replication of existent and combined identities. Here the human body is presented as the major source of self-exploration and expression of personality.
Courtesy of the artist