video feature
Videoartist of the Month December 2020
Maria Korporal
Video Artist of the Month December 2020 –
Maria Korporal
In 2010, a new name appeared in the videoart circus – Maria Korporal – a Dutch artist living at that time in Italy. She submitted to VideoChannels – “self~imaging” – a program & exhibition of selfportraying via moving images. Maria’s “Midwinter Night’s Dream – was one of the most impressing works, and I was eager to learn more about the artist and new works. Only short time afterwards included Giorgio Fedeli, who was invited curator for a program of videoart for “CologneOFF 2011 – Videoart in a global context” – and surprise, he had selected a video by Maria Korporal. From this moment on, she submitted nearly every year and – opened each time the typical imaginary cosmos to the world by using her original and unmistakable artistic language. Meanwhile living Berlin, yes, the framework of NewMediaFest2020 seems to be the best occasion to honour Maria Korporal’s contribution to video art through this solo feature as “Videoartist of the Month December 2020”.
In fact there are two features, because the video program screened on ALPHABET is not identical with the one on on this page, which is including two additional videos – kept in archives, but not selected and presented before, so the number of 12 videos created between 2010 and 2020 can be considered as a kind of retrospective since Marial Korporal started conquering the videoart world in 2010. I wish Maria at this stage to keep her artistic power and inspiration she is sharing with the audience and her fellow artists. I hope to be able to accompany her exciting artistic development for the next 10 years to come! Good luck and all the best to you, Maria!
> see Maria’s videos featured as a screening program @ Alphabet Cinema M
List of 12 featured videos
The artist portraits herself sleeping in a warm and cosy ambient near the fireplace with the cat purring. She falls into a dream in which she seems to experience a rebirth. A flamingo with its head in the water moves in concentric circles creating a whirlpool. Struggling with her arms and legs, the artist finally manages to emerge.
The video is part of the project Korporal Zoo, a series of short movies which deal with the relationship between animals and human beings studied from several prospectives: cultural, social, environmental.
In The Waltz appear birds flying freely, and a couple of women (they can be sisters, friends, lovers) closed in a cage, who dance an endless waltz. At the end they manage to liberate themselves…
The video has a clear reference to gender issues and women’s emancipation.
e) Desert Tree is based on a Mongolian legend about camels: Many years ago, God gave antlers to the camel, as a reward for the goodness of its heart. But one day a rogue deer came and asked the camel to lend him his antlers. He wanted to adorn himself with them for a celebration in the west of the country. The camel trusted the deer and gave him his antlers. But the deer never brought them back. Since then, the camels keep gazing at the horizon and still await the deer’s return.
The video is the fruit of an encounter between a poet and a visual artist. Along the pathway of
life, they share their stories, and open up different spaces and times. The images and sounds are
born of a stone, discovered in the dry grass: it takes on life in the hand of the artist. The poem was
written specially for the video and is published here for the first time. { naked } — because, as poet
Daìta Martinez says, stone is naked. We have only to open it for it to come out, alive.
Why do humans do themselves harm? Why do they destroy the nature they are part of? These are the questions that the artist, as part of humankind, asks herself, through a variety of expressive spaces and languages including performances, fragments of historical films and animated drawings on paper. The whispers of “nevermore” pronounced by the artist and transformed into voices both feminine and masculine make us think of a promise sealed with a kiss – a promise that takes wing and is carried off by the wind.
“Attempt to form squares instead of circles around a stone falling into water” and “Attempt to fly”, two works by Gino De Dominicis from 1969, inspired Maria Korporal in her performance in
this video. Defying the laws of gravity, the artist tries to immerse herself in the immortality so much longed for by De Dominicis.
In this video, the artist acts with what she calls her “third eye”: a small video camera attached to her forehead. On the runway of the historical airport Tempelhof in Berlin she takes off and flies into outer space. We see what she sees through her third eye, as she reaches the area of which Man Ray spoke about in his “Pepys Diary” (1959): “Somewhere in outer space the images of the entire history of mankind travel on the airwaves”.korporal
nerwaltz
The film has been created on the piece of music “Anne Frank” by Shiri Malckin, with Nina Maroccolo reading from her book “Annelies Marie Frank”: “I blossomed as a woman at Prinsengracht 263 on 4 August 1944, when the Dutch Nazi police captured me shamelessly alive among the unmade beds…” – Footage has been taken mostly in nowadays Berlin: ex-concentration camp Sachsenhausen, and the city panorama seen from the Fernsehturm. Memory of the earth…
If the soul is a flame, how many candles should light up the oceans where nuclear waste is killing all living creatures?
“There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea.”
These words by Thomas Hood are read by Shiri Malckin, over and over again, in her musical piece “Underwater Desert” which forms the soundtrack of the video.
One of the most neglected aspects about refugees is that they are in a situation of emergency in which they have to take a decision immediately, and whatever they decide, there is no turning back. Just as the butterfly in this video: “Fourteen seconds to decide, will you stay or fly away?” Whether the butterfly decides to stay or to fly, the circle closes anyway and takes away any possibility to go back on the tracks.
While the summer in Berlin in 2018 was the hottest and driest in the whole history, the month of July 2017 had brought us only heavy rain. The Landwehrkanal emerged from the banks, basements overflowed. Extreme climatological events, which take place all over the world, should be a warning sign to large industry and governments. My hope is that humanity will respond to Earth’s emergency call and not let the phone rust in the water.
In this video I visualize the tensions of the Coronavirus situation and the lockdown. In the end I imagine the liberation and the beauty of the time when we can hug each other again: it will feel like the magic of your first romantic kiss ever.
