Minute 17

 Minute 17 (by Nicole Schmid)

Like mother, like daugher

When I got my two minutes, I realized that I would have to present them as the first and last minute of one session. Therefor I wanted to create both minutes as a frame for the session and connect them visually and regarding content, context and meaning. Both minutes are about people I love and miss. Minute 17 is about Andrea, one of my mothers, who committed suicide though carbon monoxide poisoning in 2005 when I was 18 years old. The other is about Luca, my daughter and my first child. She had anencephaly and was stillborn in 2012.

I was struck by the two newspaper quotes from the introductory lecture, namely:

“We already can collect and reproduce words; now we can collect and reproduce life. We might even, for instance, see those as if living again long after they have been gone” (Le Radical 30 December 1895) and “When apparatuses like this are available to the public, when everyone can photograph those that are dear to them, not only their posed forms, but their movements, their actions, their familiar gestures, with words at the tips of their tongues, death will cease to be absolute” (La Poste 30 December 1895)

Both for Andrea and Luca I predominantly have photographs readily available. I used my two film minutes to create video collages by adding a selection of this photographic material to the original minutes, and thus to give the photographs life through movement in order to “see those as if living again long after they have been gone”.

To me, both minutes represent two different types of decay. The fire hazard of nitrate film made me think of Andrea because she was a firefighter (as well as seeing decay as the loss of memory in addition to the loss of a person). The water damage on the film rolls used in Decasia made me think of Luca who was not able to live because amniotic fluid washed away her exposed brain in utero. Both of them have been put to the fire through cremation, both of their ashes have been added to the soil and humidity of forests.

Minute 17: like mother…

This year I turn 36. This means that I will be alive longer than I have spent my life with my mother Andrea. We were, we are alike in our oddities, in our facial features, in our dad joke humor and in our meticulousness. When she died, she left a large archive of her life which I held onto and have carried with me. After her career as a professional fire fighter, she had her own one-person company where she produced and sold training equipment to firefighting departments. During this time, she also had her coming out as a trans woman. One challenge of making a video collage is that I only have a few photographs of her post-transition, and these pictures tend to have a dismal quality.

My original minute starts with dancers and a round drum. I have paired them with photographs of Andrea training airport firefighters on how to use her invention, the foambox. The foambox is a device to test the fire extinguishing capabilities of different types of foam on a small scale with less cost and less environmental harm. In these pictures, the fire is placed in a round tray that resembles the drum of the original minute, and while the people around the fire do not move, they still resemble the formation of dancers. To the original sound I have added the only sound I have left of Andrea talking. The sound comes from a video I made with my phone, playing a cassette tape recording. The writing on the cassette says “Logopädie”, it is Andrea practicing a poem and recording it to train her voice to sound more female. The video of the dancers then melts into pictures of Andrea as a young fire fighter, and then, when the sound accidentally stops, into photographs of her and us that were used for an article in the magazine Stern about the low pay of workers in the public sector. They then melt into pictures of a fire in Frankfurt to where Andrea was assigned during her training. There, another firefighter fell from the roof and died.

After the sound sets in again, Andrea is seen in her workshop, extinguishing a fire she created for testing the foam box. This is layered onto the part of the original minute when the face of a (possibly Japanese?) woman appears on screen. Here I added words on screen to play with the double meaning of save/retten/speichern and delete/extinguish/ löschen to be followed with children’s pictures of Andrea and the pictures of a burnt down building from one of her assignments. After the words “Download failed” I’ve added pictures of her workshop. This is where she died. The space has been torn down recently and now hosts a condo building. Paired with the word “save” are pictures of Andrea doing a demonstration of the foambox a few months before she died. I found them much later in a model making forum, every picture accompanied by one of her funny comments.

These pictures blur into the last part of the original minute which shows one person trying to carry another person from out of the water. Here I added the scan of a black and white photocopy of a photograph I no longer own. To me, the word save refers to my inability to see and understand the deep depression she was in and offer her compassion, care, or resources instead of making the insulted demands of a teenager. The day before she died, she wanted to make amends and offered me a hug which I, dumb as fuck, declined. It also refers to my inability to save my memory of her, especially the three-dimensional memory of her movement, sound, and touch. The very last picture therefor is an AI-generated video based on a photograph of her face which, consequently, is not the recreation of a memory but an additional distortion.