Karl-Heinz Klopf

ATTIC MYSTERY TOUR

2022
HD, no sound, 5 min

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The roof truss of Orth Castle on the Danube, a multi-story building section that no human has ever seen in this way: Like a retro explorer in a time travel movie, Karl-Heinz Klopf sends a camera drone over the wooden beams of the attic under the gable. It flies over and between the beams, turns in front of a wall and starts its return flight. It's not just the literal dust of time that makes you shiver in this somewhat spooky exploration. It's certainly not the peaceful ghost of the castle, either. But it is the strange gaze of the camera eye from a mechanical apparatus that presupposes the presence of man as marginal. In a 1996 essay on the culture of memory in dealing with the landing of the Allied troops in June 1944, Paul Virilio wrote of the "industrialization of forgetting," by which he meant the medial mass exploitation of this event. And so this drone view, which dives into past layers and sees everything but contextualizes nothing, also reminds me of our eerie speed with which we forget historical events because they are simply industrially destroyed in our media and online excesses. (Patricia Grzonka)