| Once Upon a Time |
| experimenteller Videofilm | dv | Farbe | 22'0'' | Deutschland | 2006 |
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© Corinna Schnitt
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In a living room, a camera is slowly turning round, about thirty centimetres above the carpet. There is no one to be seen. A cat suddenly appears
and moments later a second one enters the room. A dog drinks water from a fish bowl, a bird joins the assembled company, a rabbit hops in, a goose waggles its way among them, somewhere a pig is grubbing about, and there is a goat, and there is a lama, and there is no end to it. Gradually the room fills up with more and more animals which are sniffing each other, startling each other, or munching on a house plant together. In the intro to "Living a Beautiful Life" (2003), an earlier work by Corinna Schnitt, we saw all kinds of very young children sitting, lying, walking, and playing naked together in an idyllic landscape. The religious or romantic association with a primeval world in which living creatures would once have co-existed, also emerges from "Once Upon a Time". The natural habitat in which these animals once lived has been replaced by the interior of a house. Does the word "natural" have any meaning left in connection with animals that, in our culture, have practically all been domesticated? They are simply pets and domestic animals, so they are not really out of place here. As is often the case in Schnitt's work, here too, it seems to be about the artificiality or neurotic quality of human behaviour and the problematic contrast between 'nature' and 'culture'. Although man is absent in this work, in that absence he is still part of the representation. Observing these animals that will not often be found together in this sort of setting easily makes one think about how we would behave in this kind of room.
Corinna Schnitt was born in 1964. Artist and director, she has evolved in the artistic milieu as much in Germany as internationally. After an apprenticeship in wood sculptures, she studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and at the Art Academy of Düsseldorf. For a number of years now she has resorted to the medium of cinema fo her artistic creations. She has thus made a series of experimental short films in which daily phenomena are pushed to the absurd, like a spiral with no end. Besides a number of video installations projected in museums and galleries, Corinna unveils her works in the framework of film festivals as well as on German television.
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