Marcellvs L.
Marcellvs L. (born 1980) works break with our everyday experience of time by decelerating his videos to the extreme through the renunciation of any and all action. His artistic method thus references the expanded understanding of time in the sense of Henri Bergson’s concept of the “intuition of duration.” Bergson counters real time with psychically experienced time as “duration.” With fixed camera angles, the recording of routine motifs such as a boat, passersby, a railway station, or a monument and without a fixed script, Marcellvs achieves this very deceleration of the moment that sharpens one’s view for seemingly inconsequential details. It is thus the small, periphery things that determine the image with the passage of time and begin to interest us. Even sound looses nothing of its randomness after being processed on the computer and renders the recorded situation in “real time.” On the contrary, he even enables the recorded scene to be physically experienced. Marcellvs finds this situation and discovers its special features by placing it the center of attention, giving it time and thus complete attention – as in “Spree” for example (2007). Like in earlier works, boats and water are recurrent elements (ebbing.flowing, 2006). Not in the picture itself, the Spree influences the movements in the picture which comprises a composition of exterior pictures of a houseboat and a house. In this way as well as through the stretching of time and the integration of natural as well as accidental influences his works are given a contemplative moment as it were and occasionally even offer physical experiences.
