Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore.
Or sell it if you can find a fool, it´s full of holes, it´s full of holes.

William Burroughs, The Western Land

it's full of holes, it's full of holes is an analogue slide installation with two screens, 14 min and 17 min, not synchronized. The scene represented deals with the crucial moment in which a specific kind of contact between individuals is established, within which a notion of physical intimacy transgresses the conventions defined for regular public spaces and social spheres, thus hinting to the possibility of a certain loss of control.

A female police officer searches the bodies of women at the entrance to a stadium where a football match will soon take place. The stadium represents a contemporary place of ritual violence and the loss of control. The female police officer embodies the law, thus indicating the limits of acceptable behavior. She symbolizes the line one should under no circumstance cross. Though the way she touches the women' s bodies, most intimately, sexually charged, lingering between transgression, aggression and embrace, suggests she herself will potentially ignore the demarcations and borders of convention.

The scene was shot on super-8 film of which single frames have been transferred to slide and enlarged. They pass by the eye of the spectator in slow motion, a procession of frames dissolving in the semi darkness of space, always leaving behind a trace, a memory of their predecessors. The silent black and white images sometimes recall the early days of cinema. Filmed in Metz, France.

Constanze Ruhm for Spuren der Inszenierung at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Haus.0 by Fareed Armaly, 2001 ︎





Stills



Installation view of 10th EAST International, Norwich Gallery, 2000. Photographs by Ludo Engels


Installation view of Spuren der Inszenierung, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2001