A Murder and a Dream unit 5a ear and eye texts

I talked with Barbara Hammer about these generations of artists finding each other written about in the last blog. She mentioned that we search for the people who came before us in their works and we cannot see them, only traces of them. This was before her performance in the cafe of the Hamburger Bahnhof.

The performance started with Barbara pushing a projector around the room through the audience, casting the image of her younger self against the walls, in two corners of a wall, along the ceiling, and on pillars. The image showed a young Barbara in many activities which seemed to want to push the frame that held her; running to its edges, sitting in a window, pushing the walls with her hands, and while these images were fighting the frame itself, the projection seemed to help her along, extending the frame, thus her body far along the wall, split into several areas of the room. Finally, the projector held its position, and the image of the young film maker showed her attacking the screen, the frame with a knife. Meanwhile the older Barbara was actually behind the screen and began slicing into it, into herself with a real knife. The young Barbara began hanging in shreds, her torn body moving on the falling pieces of the screen, while the older Barbara emerged from behind the screen, having done some kind of cinecide, leaving as she said earlier in the cafe, only traces behind.

When the New Barbara emerged, she walked towards the projector until she eclipsed its light. At this point two projectors began casting images onto a huge balloon hung from the ceiling. It seemed some dream travel of various cities and landscapes, and because they were slightly out of synch with each other it seemed like a dream struggling to remember itself. As the curved images danced on the surface, the audience sat on the floor all around the balloon, and it appeared to me that we all collectively held this dream in space above us in wonder.