Artist:
Dora García (born 1965 in Valladolid, Spain; lives and works in Barcelona, Spain).

Materials:
35-mm film, black-and-white, sound, transferred to video; 11 min 30 sec.

Description:
“The camera’s eye tours through an abandoned house. Accurately it scans the walls, the window panes in their metal grooves and the light rooms. Its gaze slides over flaking paint. The outspoken architecture of this distinguished building (Hôtel Wolfers in Brussels) is designed by Henry van de Velde. The soundless recordings, made in black and white on 35-mm film, the historical location, and the chosen technique underline the story that is narrated by the voice-over. This story, a film script, dates back to 1965 but refers to 1929, the same era from which the building stems. There is no relation between the recordings of the space and the narration, although both sometimes seem to coincide. The house is a neutral space that is filled with the story written in 1965 by Samuel Beckett and bears the same mane as Dora Garcia’s work: Film.”
—Nanda Janssen, “Film (Hôtel Wolfers),” LIMA. 

“In Film (Hôtel Wolfers), sound and image are independent but strangely connected. We hear a male voice discussing the principle of the subjective camera employed in different ways in three films: Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), Moustapha Akkad’s The Message (1976), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). In each film the camera is assigned a distinctive role by the director, as if embodying a character. Shot first of on black and white 35-mm film, the video presents Henry van de Velde’s celebrated Wolfers House in Brussels, as if in an architectural documentary. But García uses conventions of the subjective camera, which—with a furtive and distracted eye—scans the decaying walls of the building, suggesting the detached attention of the historical gaze.”
—”H Box: Dora García, Film (Hôtel Wolfers),” Tate, July 3, 2008.