Artist:
Ulla von Brandenburg (born 1974 in Karlsruhe, Germany; lives and works in Paris, France).

Materials:
Black and white 16mm film; sound; 14 min 34 sec.

Description:
“Ulla von Brandenburg’s Singspiel (“song-play”) was filmed in one single shot at Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, following actors in a deceptive track through the house. In each space, a character performs a gesture or movement. The dialogue between the actors is performed by singing a collection of partially connected sentences. The title, which refers to an opera/operetta-style German musical drama, heightens the tragic and uncomfortable sense haunting the work.”
—”Ulla von Brandenburg, Singspiel,” Tel Aviv Museum of Art website.

“The artist’s newest film work, Singspiel (2009), made for the Venice Biennale, was shot in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and continues her investigation into the mechanics of theater, the exploration of constructed behavior through performance and the significance of gesture, with a special emphasis on the formal aspects of staging, as well as uneasy or unexpressed psychological states. Loosely inspired by the history of the building while it was still in the hands of its original owners, von Brandenburg constructs a series of evocative, narratively sparse episodes that revolve around what appears to be a family. Using professional actors for the first time, the artist sets up a series of cinematic encounters inside the house. As in her previous films these play out as autonomous but also interconnected episodes that rest on minimal, symbolic, sometimes even absurd gestures rather than an immediately legible narrative structure. Each gesture provides a clue for the story that unfolds. A man carries a box into a room; an elderly woman tries without success to open a door; a boy lies ill in bed; a man tries to untie a knot; we don’t know the reason for these actions but it is clear that inside the pristine interiors of the villa an underlying sense of unease pervades. Despite the utopian aspirations underlying Le Corbusier’s architecture, the reality of life in Villa Savoye was not so perfect. Singspiel thus intimates this lesser-known history of the villa, alluding to the dystopic aspect of this emblematic building. The artist’s ongoing preoccupation with early psychoanalysis is here subtly reflected in the analogy made between the purification of the soul and the purification of architecture with a view to attaining a higher state of being and living, respectively. Singspiel hints at the human cracks and fissures that ‘inhabit’ this seemingly perfect space, as well as the mental states that remain unspoken or repressed.”
—Katerina Gregos, “Ulla von Brandenburg at Vogt Gallery, New York,” Flash Art 267 (July-September 2009).