Felicitas

2005 - Installation (Installation)

Pablo Pijnappel

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In Felicitas, we follow the converging routes of three characters: Felicitas, Michael and Andrew (the artist’s father-in-law who also features elsewhere). Felicitas is thedaughter of a German industrialist who immigrated to Rio after the Second World War. She is the one visible with a toucan in several images. In his work, Pablo Pijnappel privileges pre-existing images – the slides presented here are photographs found in his family archives or from other sources (media, photographs of film sets…). Sometimes, the same image is used several times with a different caption, thus encapsulating other meanings. Presented in the form of an installation with three synchronized slide projectors, Felicitas offers a complex scenario, where text and images can simultaneously be descriptive, intermingled or completely autonomous. Disjunctions and repetitions create the pace: the captioned images appear one after the other, with no regular order, sometimes on the left, in the centre or on the right. Even though the story follows a certain chronology, it is not linear and looks more like a complex collage of images and anecdotes which overlap. The text does not illustrate the images but functions as a complement that allows for the creation of multiple readings of the characters, of their lives, their trips and encounters. These collages are a mixture of real and fictional stories that enable Pijnappel to play with the notion of the documentary. The subtitles are in an informative tone, but they are mostly subjective and imagined commentaries thus creating what can be called a documentary fiction. This artwork has cinematographic qualities while deconstructing those conventions. Chris Marker’s film La jetée in which the relation between voice-over and still images creates a space for free interpretation was a likely direct influence.

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Pablo Pijnappel’s work is foremost highly constructed. He builds narrations based on anecdotes and everyday events, perhaps souvenirs, family legends or plain fictions. The non-linear use of different archives and film extracts highlights this uncertainty and contributes to the loss of these stories over time. The works only offer pauses and silent moments, allowing the investment of our imagination. The ‘life stories’ told by Pablo Pijnappel are often those of his family who travelled a lot and had to adapt to new countries and their cultures. Through his tales, we visit Brazil in the 1940s, Japan, the United Kingdom and also Germany. Pablo Pijnappel was born in 1979 in Paris, and he lives and works in Amsterdam .

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Colors:

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• reinterpretation.n.02
• disjunction.n.01
• documentary.n.01
• repetition.n.02
• narrative.s.01
• fabrication.n.01
• monochrome