2011
two-channel video / installation
Freud‘s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” extensively explores forgetting and mistakes, which are the basic mechanisms behind Lala Raščić’s video performance “A Load From the Inside – Reviewed”. The performance was commissioned for the contemporary art programme of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, entitled “A View From Outside – Reloaded”. Raščić’s performance appears to take place in the Freud family‘s Vienna apartment, preserved from oblivion in a photographic mise-en-scène of the museum, which was the family’s former home.
The artist inserts herself into photographs taken by Edmund Engelman just days before the Father of Psychoanalysis and his family left Vienna. Via digital imaging, she sneaks through the photographic evidence like a concealed childhood memory. The artist’s character is costumed and coiffed in accordance with the period – the nineteen thirties, yet her penetration into Sigmund Freud’s everyday working and living space is anything but discreet and inconspicuous. Contributing to this is, of course, the scale of the artist’s character in the video, ranging from a figurine to a human being, as is her performance encrypted in the form of a skit or slapstick. Before the photographic mise-en-scène, Raščić deliberately makes awkward attempts to take the potential position of a human character. She tries to fill the apparently empty spaces of appropriated memories, but does so extremely clumsily. So clumsily that her skit‘s directing invokes early comedians such as Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers. The physically expressive act, throughout a trial and error procedure, attempts to fix the costumed intruder/performer into the historical photographs.
from Text by Jasna Jakšić, 2011
READ FULL TEXT BY JASNA JAKŠIĆ
A Load From the Inside
two channel video installation, lettering
11 min, BW/mute
video by: Ivan Slipcevic
photos by: Edmund Englemann
Commissioned by Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna
Supported by Ministry of Culture Croatia, City of Zagreb
Lala Raščić 