EXTERN TRAVEL

Here De Cock presents a twenty minute, uninterrupted travelling shot. The setting is a typical Belgian B road, with poorly lit pubs and cars speeding in the background. The shot was made near Waterloo, a symbol-laden place that represents death, loss and defeat, but also hope. The work provides little context for what is going on. The travelling shot confronts us with an alienating sequence of events, from a yellow concrete mixer driving backwards, to scenes with a hearse decorated with flowers, a parked caravan, or a man walking past with a wooden board on his shoulder. After twenty minutes, the camera arrives at a building that has the word “cinema” on its roof spelt out in white letters. But is this really a cinema? De Cock asks more questions than he is willing to answer, and clearly intends to create some sort of alienation, instead of explaining things. Extern travel is part of the installation Vertigo or the area of free catalogues, a work the artist created in the autumn of 1999 at Argos. According to the artist, the work is “a three-dimensional mise en scène with videos and construction material.” It refers to cinema, both formally—at Argos a track for a camera dolly divided the space in two—and with regard to content and title (Hitchcock).

This work has been digitised in the frame of DCA Project