As if You Are Catching a Bomb

2014 | video (single-channel) | 8 minutes | dialogue

collaboration with Egle Budvytyte

A heavily injured woman instructs men in suits to stand in specific postures while they are being filmed.

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Wrapped in absurd, exaggerated bandages, with fake blood and plasters, a woman (artist Egle Budvytyte) gives instructions to men in suits. The men are bankers, lawyers and the like, all spotted at Amsterdam's financial disctrict (Zuidas) and the poses they perform are taken from photographs of different popular uprisings, amongst which the protests in Paris in 1968, Prague in that same year, Greece in 2007 and the riots in London in 2008.

The amused conviviality of the men, who are in their lunch breaks, as they follow the instructions of the woman, is put to the test, when she persists with weak voice, for them to hold their often straining positions just a little longer, and to be just a little more precise.

Finding themselves ordered about and pushed by this strange character, the men are rendered somewhat insecure.

Inspired by the financial crisis, the video is a musing on power relations and on the way 'victims' hold a specific kind of power over the 'guilty'. But behind it's somewhat aggressive facade of theatricality, it ultimately reveals the human character of the men in suits.

camera: Egle Budvytyte/Bart Groenendaal

production: Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam

curator: Rieke Vos