About Trapez / Trapezoid by Josephin Böttger

Homo faber’s hands are constantly working.

The tool-making and nature-dominating ape has faces: the face of an animal, the face of a man. Homo faber is the man: planned production, coordinated collective work and building construction.

Homo faber’s hands are no longer alone. He has made prostheses.
The prostheses are Legion.
Some grab and smash what is not to be maintained, some lift and set down metallic substance, others bring water or liquid concrete and yet others move through the air and take homo faber the man with them in flight.
At the same time the animal in homo faber is watching the proceedings, but does not want to be discovered. It crawls past, time and time again, and assures itself of its animal face.

Hand, prosthesis, animal, man, crawling alone, building collectively. Water, stone, metal. And the clouds. The clouds drift past, laden with energy, illustrating the drama of non-human nature: that drifting without direction, that pretense of process.

Josephin Böttger’s black-and-white videos pick up on a current theme: wherever something old and non-profitable is standing, it must be demolished and something that more readily complies with capital logic must be built.

Again and again, demolition and construction begin anew.
The prosthesis almost tenderly grabs a window and tears it off. The prosthesis gently throws water on it to avoid the formation of a large dust cloud. The prosthesis flies with homo faber the man. At the same time, he is also standing below and wandering through the geometry - changing the geometry - working collectively and coordinating, until there is dizziness and utter uneventfulness, this being the eternal exposition of what was time, in space.

The entirety requires a long shot, the spatialisation of the whole does not permit anything else. The camera only occasionally zooms in when a collective action shows special coordination, or an individual task shows something like tenderness. The thousand-petaled activity on the construction site occasionally demands a fast motion sequence, but real time returns - the real time in which the oversized animal (superimposed via bluescreen) crawls through the entire width between camera and construction site.

But in what time did the the discovery of the geometric shapes occur that the metal scaffold and gondola are based on? Realistic images are moved into the graphical and reach an almost unconceivably abstract moment, considering that our collective attitude in everyday life is to take these geometric shapes as an invisible given.

Mauricio Isaza-Camacho