Jörg Herold
«Body within a Body»

Jörg Herold eliminates the narrative element from his Super-8 film ‘Körper im Körper' by the use of extreme slow motion, granting the images a substantiality and material quality that is hard to describe. The soundtrack, which consists of a voice speaking the single words ‘house', ‘woman', ‘head' and ‘breath', intensifies the feeling of slowness, heaviness and materiality. The camera seems like a body let loose on its surroundings, concentrating on just a few objects, processes and views as it slowly feels its way around. The voice, in turn, appears to represent a kind of interior dialogue, a ‘body within a body'. Herold has described his experience of the demise of the GDR as a ‘release from ideology and arrival in arbitrariness'. Trying to regain his bearings, he became fascinated by the figure of Kaspar Hauser and started to develop an artistic double existence as Hauser–Herold. In retrospect, ‘Körper im Körper', which was shown at ‘documenta X' in Kassel in 1997, can be seen as an important precursor of the artist's Hauser project.