Video consists of three looped video films that are shown on screens hanging from the ceiling in a triangle. The room is otherwise dark and silent; there is no soundtrack.
One film shows a mime that I had seen on the street in Milan. She was one of these 'living statues' that usually are not very good at what they are trying to do - but in front of her we had to stop. She was quite big, her face was painted white and she wore a white robe and something white on her head. Only her eyes, which were very large and shiny, were black and even they stood perfectly still when she was performing. After several minutes, the statue came to life in a slow, fluid and elegant way before freezing into another classical pose. I picked up a piece of paper from a basket in front of her feet, assuming it was a horoscope or something, but it turned out to be her address. "If you have taken photos of me, please send it to the following address", the note read. I had taken b/w photos of her, which I later used in My very gestures, but I also wrote a letter asking her to come over to London, where I was living on a grant so that I could do a video with her. When Sarah Mucaria arrived and climbed out of the taxi, we became almost instant friends even though we were speaking face-to-face for the first time. She really moved me when I filmed her in front of a red backdrop; she started her session by crying for the first five minutes. Later she explained that this happened every time she started because she didn't even move her eyelids for several minutes at a time. "But then the eyes produce their own humidity", she explained (a biological improbability).
The film could be taken for a slide projection for several minutes. If a visitor doesn't take that time and wait, he or she can miss her change of poses and mistake the film for a single image. She looks very white against the red, and immaculate like a porcelain sculpture.
The second film shows Krylon Superstar, a gay singer and performer from New York who had already posed for L'Invitation au Voyage, Part 3: Ghosts. He wears a red dress that he selected himself and black boots, and has long hair. I asked him to dance wildly to house music (which the viewer would not hear later). At one point he throws his leg so high into the air that you can get a glimpse of what is underneath his dress.
The film is cut into single images by a strobe light. The frequency was very slow, so that what you see is a sequence of single images divided by black intervals, but just fast enough for the spectator to be able to form the idea of a continuous movement in his mind.
In the third film I act myself, performing a kind of expressionist, early Mary Wigman-style modern dance, though the movement here isn't any more understandable to the viewer. I'm dancing in a dark room, holding a camera and taking flash photos of myself from time to time, and only then can you see me. I wear a rather gothic, long black dress and a wig with very long, black hair. My face is painted with grey and white ornaments, similar to those on the faces in L'Invitation au Voyage, Part 4: Masks, but you can only see this on the random photos that I took of myself while performing, Antje’s photos.
The intervals between the flashes are too long for the spectator's mind to fill in; he sees only the single, frozen images of poses.
The show was about time - frozen time in still images and fluid time in dance movements - and about the point in which still images become movement in our minds. It was also about dance: the slow and precise movements of the mimes expressive hands had just as much to do with dance as the wild movements of Krylon, and finally about the transformation of a person into an artwork. When I met Sarah Mucaria and Krylon Superstar, each of them had already developed a highly stylized art persona that they used for their work.