DAS HAUS

Das Haus is a new work that deepens the exploration of sculptural architecture that Aglaia Konrad conducted with the series of 16mm films Concrete and Samples. Shot in a house designed by architect Juliaan Lampens in Sint-Martens-Latem (Belgium), the film resumes the artist’s interest on the possibilities of the cinematic medium to generate –rather than capture - an architectural experience. An experience which, in this film, surpasses the visual to mobilize bodily perception and even desire.

Konrad’s editing carefully measures the doses of perceptual information it provides to our orientation drive in a process that departs from an initial willingness to orient oneself towards the pleasure of surrendering to disorientation and fragmentation. A disorientation that could be called “perverse” in the sense that Freud bestowed to the word –perverse pleasures are those which linger in the detour; in the resistance to result in a productive goal– insofar as the film replaces the production of a representation of space in favour of perceptive defamiliarization and tactile pleasure.

Architecture and film are constantly looking at each other in a piece in which "angle", "transition", "cut", "sequence", "frame", " joint", " fold " and "rhythm" are notions that are spread from one discipline to the other as if the camera and editing would be reading the space as a composition score.
There are two architectural comparisons that are often applied to filmmaking: the idea of cinema as a "window" and as “mirror". Das Haus, entangles and complicates those comparisons by treating windows as interfaces that blur the inside and outside and whose transparency acquires materiality, and by using mirrors as devices that disrupt form pushing it to a state of potentiality.

In Das Haus the screen is no longer a window but rather a skin: for it is a body interface, a tactile surface and a membrane that is neither safe nor transparent because it reveals its inner cinematic compositional strategies. (Source: Anna Manubens)