TRANSLATION (2017, 3:09min, FullHD)
What characterizes cultural exchange on an international level? Speeches of diplomats, ambassadors and cultural workers were extracted and recombined.  Sign language,  braille and morse code  complement this linguistic potpourri. 





IN ERSTER LINIE / FIRST AND FOREMOST (2016, 5:30 min, FullHD)

When thousands of refugees were arriving in Austria in 2015, the Austrian government was very slow to take action, maybe even waiting on purpose, as to provoke images of despair and upheaval that should serve as a deterrant for other refugees. So during the first few weeks, it was the so-called civil society that actually helped the refugees, while the European solidarity was being hotly debated and argued about in the media. The debate concerning border fences, which were downplayed to „technical protection“ or even „ doors with side panels“, was the starting point for my examination with the language of politics. 
 
A GRAVE matter such as the way refugees are being treated in a crisis, was consequently engraved into glass. The animation is based on time-lapse images of cloud formations. Their outlines were then engraved onto a little more than 3000 small pieces of glass with an electric engraving cutter. However, these lines don’t so much resemble clouds anymore, but rather ever-changing border lines on a map.
 
The individual sentences have been taken from Austrian news reports that were aired in September 2015 and later. The collage made of these sentences shows the helplessness and inability of the Austrian government as well as the disunity on the European level. The politicians have been hiding themselves behind hollow phrases and platitudes whereas television has been responding continually with the same limited language. In this video I want to express my anger about the lack of solidarity, commitment, willingness to help and empathy.

Making-of: https://vimeo.com/237042661

 
TINTENKILLER | INK ERASER (2009, 4:30 min)

In 2010, the television show Tatort celebrates its fortieth birthday: no other production has influenced a genre so greatly or been the epitome of popular German culture for such a long time. Veronika Schubert’s found footage animation Ink Eraser draws from this rich reservoir. The artist’s special interest, however, is not in the genre or the medium, but instead, in what the genre and the medium contribute to contemporary visual and linguistic culture. Ink Eraser is a montage of entirely incidentally emerging visual and linguistic clichés and phrases. The genre of constitutive gestures is called on for this: the discovery of a corpse, a telephone conversation, a lying suspect, a confessing murderess, an assurance that it is all routine, is not intentional, etc.; on the other hand, the composition allows the shreds of language and images to also come to unusual, surprising, even humorous insights and points: 
Was the dead woman having her period? – That would most definitely interest Dr. Eckermann! A bit of coke isn’t a big thing…… – No thanks, I’m on duty.
Ink Eraser abstracts a collage from rituals and banalities that define every television crime show, as such, and compiles, quasi literally, a type of blueprint of the genre: ink rather than blood flows through the images. In tedious, finely detailed work, Schubert processed 3,000 individual images with ink and eraser pen. This technique rests on the progression of saturation and emptiness, of blue color that is made visible and invisible, which then appears as white. Tension and intensity thus become immediately visible in icy dark blue images that at some point freeze the blood of their viewers to ice.

(Sixpackfilm / Sylvia Szely; Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt)