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› the ghost who refuses to play dead
My memory begins with a picture: Scenes at the beach, the shape of a human being going into the sea. A woman. She is already up to the hips in the water. Her body is slim. She seems middle age and in my memory she has long dark hair. She is alone and first it looks like, as if she want to take a bath. Their course (walk) is straight-lined, without interruptions.
A more precise description of my picture is impossible, just single details are present. Innumeral rays of light playing with the waves, which are resplendently reflecting in my memory. The internal view can’t be straighten, the picture can’t be frozen. At large, I remember the film, starting from the time, where the woman goes into the water, without cuts and perspective changes.
Inevitably my memory is affected by a “shiver of impossibility”, which adjusted itself by the presented reality of the taken scene in contrast to its mysterious end. It corresponds therefore more to a short progress report - felt memory and less an revelatory description of the picture process. The whole time in the film, I guess to be able to say, there was an atmosphere of an unplanned, coincidental recording perceptible, a kind of unintentional testimony, which condensed the fast process of the event and its drastic end towards an actual and unchosen participation.
Before I understand, what actually happens, the woman already has crossed that border, where one usually starts paddeling with the arms from where one slid in the water. She lifts her arms not, does not seem not to push off into the water. I remember clearly a feeling fear for uneasiness, which appeares to me, when I observe this movement. Then it is already no more the course, which I have still in front of my eyes, but with countable steps the deeper and deeper immersing of her body into the waves. Finally she is up to the neck under water and one instant later her head disappears also. The camera remains at its view for a while, as like in expectation of the reemerging woman out of the waves, at the point, at which the shape submerged. The screen window was, I believe, largely enough, in order to catch even a localtransferred reappearance of the woman in the waves due to her diving. But however, it happens nothing. The picture remains “empty”. The woman does not emerge again. I’m not shure anymore, what I saw then, how long for instance the camera picture was held, but I remind however camera pans and/or search scans along the water and the beach. Likewise I remind an instistant, male voice, which accompanied the happening from the beginning. However I don’t remember more contents, but I guess that the comment was added later to the film.
The peace and apparent consciousness, which emanates from the woman, remained with irritating strength in my memory. Her constant and purposeful progressing aroused the impression in me, as if she was tightened of something on the other side of the water. As if she would be on her way. She did not appear to toddle or hesitate. She went only. I have also still another vague memory of a change of perspective at the beginning of the film. I believe, the camera filmed at the beginning the usual growing vegetation in the location. I believe even that the voice in the off responded in any clarifying point to these circumstances. I remember however neither the wording nor what the picture shows or indicates. Accordingly it’s difficult for me to determine the place of the shooting more exactly.
However I believe having seen during the film up to the time, at which my memory picture sets in, the picture of a beach. Onshore vegetation and as of a certain height sloping up to the water a beach.
Bernd Ruzicska, 2005
Bernd Ruzicska
artist /gallerist
RUZICSKA///WEISS Duesseldorf