Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Fabric is a montage based on remaining workprints from a commercial film about viscose that no longer exists. The original attempt of the film to visualize perfect images of a young tailor and models dressed in sensual fabric while acting within a decorative modernist setting is mirrored in its shortcoming. The leftovers only show the preliminaries, faulty repetitions and aborted takes, thus all footage which was thrownout. Clapper boards indicating each take by numbers allowed to reconstruct a part of the film’s original storyboard. The new montage shows all of the remaining snippets from the related scenes including the clapper boards, the repeated takes and the glitches in the film material. However, all parts which probably have been used to edit the original film are missing, the gaps are marked with beeps on the otherwise silent soundtrack. While following a fragile new narrative, Fabric also generates a counterpart of an artefact that was lost.

Christoph Girardet, born in Langenhagen, Germany, in 1966. He studied Fine Arts at the Braunschweig School of Art (Master’s degree in 1994). Since 1989 he has produced video tapes, video installations and films, some of them in collaboration with video artist Volker Schreiner beginning in 1994 and as of 1999 with filmmaker Matthias Müller. He was awarded a stipend for the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2000) and the Villa Massimo stipend in Rome (2004). He lives and works in Hanover.