Pirate Rooms
Film installation, 2002

The film installation Pirate Rooms searches through the empty spaces of an imaginary city, which seem to be connected by a web not recorded on any map. Pirate Rooms comprise of intermediate spaces, intellectual points of juncture, and centres of storms: spaces that have become possible.

The rooms appear light and calm, even though a camera scans through them impatiently.  The film is reeled back and forth, slows down, and stops, as if an invisible operator were examining the material in search for something. It is the scrupulous investigation of a process, as an indecisive editor might look upon it – not being able to make up her/his mind about how to unite the visual elements in a sensible way.

It is a process of investigation. Time and again, the imprints of the spaces’ pattern intrude between the camera and the motif: they are peculiar line- beings, mathematical formulas, which appear and disappear in odd ways, hindering the inquiry, but at the same time delivering new hints.

The rewinding and forwarding of the film produces combinatorial results, details become visible and the connections of the depicted object become more and more distinct. Nothing in the rooms works properly: doors seem to close themselves, others are doubled, passageways lead to nowhere, an exit opens in the ground, the window does not look out on anything but reflects the room itself.

Ghosts of formulas emerge from the ground plan to haunt an irrational architecture. It is not an optical illusion or a lunatic labyrinth of mirrors, just places encompassing their own fantasies.

The specially designed 35-mm projector is operated through a barcode attached to the film; the film material itself, taking the form of a ground plan, assumes the shape of a visible sculpture in the exhibition space.