By Andrea Božić and Julia Willms
Audio-visual installation for a white cube, 28.21 min loop, HD, colour, sound, 2015-2022
The Cube is an audio-visual installation, an immersive environment for a white cube where the entire room is part of the work. It combines the architectural and other attributes of the location with a digital video projection inserted into it that visually extends the room to create a hybrid space. The room continuously transforms through a series of slow cross-fades, bringing weather conditions, spectacular natural landscapes and animals into the standardized whitecube.
The Cube is a moving sculpture, a choreography of gaze, a performance of space, in which the point of view of the spectator and their relationship to the viewed constantly shift without them ever leaving the spot they are standing in.
The Cube is based on a series of paradoxes.The scale of a landscape or a snail is modified to fit the same cube, so everything is too big or too small. The room itself changes and, in the opposite movement of bringing outside spaces in, the visitor is moved, with the white cube they are in, on top of a mountain or into a huge aquarium. Organic matter of the nature brought into the room is combined with the inorganic matter of the architectural space. In their encounter, the room acquires properties of the organic and behaves as an organism.
The viewer becomes part of the organism by their physical presence and the inner movement of the gaze and attention. The room feels like an emotional state, evoked artificially but nevertheless real and familiar, like somewhere we used to know but have forgotten. The Cube draws one’s attention into a double movement combining theatrical and cinematic. One is both here in the space of the cube and is at the same time somewhere else, in the images of other spaces. The gaze shifts between the two, making the experience feel like both internal and external. One is here and is at the same time elsewhere. Inside is outside is inside.
"Something that opens up a new way of thinking or offers a new kind of experience is political. We need new ways of telling stories because the old ways are so contaminated by habits of thinking and being that have got us into the situation we are in now, which is not a good one. Coming from somewhere that is in between and doesn’t quite fit with existing modes of categorisation is as good a starting point as any for trying to think and do things differently. The Cube affords beholders a wonderfully gentle, but deeply affecting way of doing precisely this." Ramsay Burt
The Cube was originally made as part of the solo exhibition Spectra: Light Like A Bird, Not Like A Feather which included a series of works (performative, audio walk, installation) that together created one space and were in dialogue with each other.
Spectra is a long term project by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms that engages with the space it appears in as an organism and part of the artwork.
The Cube dimensions: depending on the size of the space; the video projection is fitted to one whole wall of the room (dimensions of the previous versions: 5 x 3m and 9 x 3,90 m). The work is site-sensitive and adjusted to the location it is presented in.
Exhibitions:
- Premiere: Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna Art Foundation (AT), 2015
- SPRING Festival, Hekmanfoyer Stadsschouwburg, Utrecht (NL), 2016
- Weesperzijde Filmfestival, Spectra Studio, Marci Panis, Amsterdam (NL), 2017
- Spectra Salon: The Cube, the Salon and the Aquarium, Spectra Studio, Marci Panis, Amsterdam (NL), 2017
- Expeditions, Oerol Festival, Terschelling (NL), 2018
- KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, KUBUS, Hanover (DE), 2022
Concept, filming, sound and installation: Andrea Božić and Julia Willms; Animation and editing: Julia Willms
Originally presented as part of Spectra: Light Like a Bird, Not Like a Feather at the Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna Art Foundation, Austria, 6-26 November 2015.