Calendar

opening hours:
(through public guided tours): Wed. 6 - 7 p.m. / Fri. - Sun. 3 - 4 p.m.

Venue:
G2 Schaulager
Dittrichring 13
04109 Leipzig


In Lydia Marx's video work Little Pictures, a camera drone acts as the flatmate of two women who live together in a large house in a rural area. The drone is sister, brother and friend and acts simultaneously as performer, image producer and narrator of the film. It navigates the viewer through the story of Hanna, Lilli and itself. In doing so, she produces images, explains situations, thoughts and contexts. It accompanies the two women through their everyday life inside the house and outside - we see them eating together at the kitchen table, leisure activities in the living room and garden, working in the fields and a funeral. The drone comments on what it sees and experiences. However, it increasingly appears as an unreliable narrator, as there are misleading inconsistencies within its statements and images: Hanna reads a book upside down, Lilli plays the piano with her toes, keyboard typing is described as playing the piano, a radio is mistaken for a dog, which is then destroyed, buried and interred. In the film, the drone's perceptual errors, its deviations in pattern recognition, become actual visual image errors. The drone itself occasionally recognises its own inadequacy and fallibility, for example when it comments at the beginning of the film:

'Although I practised a lot, I had trouble finding the entrance door. I often bumped into the narrow frame. Lilli was very good in entering the entrance door, even though she did it for the first time.

The backyard looked like the rivers, mountains, forests and shopping centres that I already knew and could usually distinguish when they were connected on maps.

She is referring to the way in which it learns in its technical function as a camera drone, which has a data memory and speaks using artificial intelligence, through repetition and reproduction, through the continuous collection of data and its compilation in an archive; how it can better recognise, distinguish and conceptually categorise its surroundings over time. The drone collects so-called training data in order to be able to act better - perhaps even more human-like? - be able to act. The drone's physical actions and movements still appear clumsy and downright vulnerable at times. And despite all the tenderness that resonates, its statements often seem interchangeable and superficial; they are learnt by heart and reproduce clichés. The drone's statement quoted above also addresses another central theme that Little Pictures deals with and that narratively connects the three very different characters - Hanna, Lilli and the drone - despite all their emphasised differences: Memories.

Not only the two women, but also the drone itself has a memory. According to her own statements, she has a memory that she sometimes describes as an almost poetic archive of memories, for example when she consciously recounts her life with birds that taught her how to fly. The drone's memory store is characterised by a local orientation: The situations and emotions it remembers are linked to individual rooms and places that are connected to each other via a so-called map. If there are disruptions between the respective connection points on this map, this can lead to disorientation and memory loss. The drone's memory does not only appear to be a carrier of its own memories, but the two women have also outsourced individual memories to the drone. In the film, Marx juxtaposes Hanna's and Lilli's apparent pregnancies with the drone's memory and storage. In doing so, she uses the image of human pregnancy to refer - associatively - to the specific significance of the human body as a storage location; as a repository not only of past memories, but also of the visibility of the future in the present.

In Little Pictures, Marx uses her specific characteristics of the drone to pose the question of how (human) memories are dealt with in the technological age and what the demands on technical devices are. And she also asks what people - from an ethical perspective - consider worth living for. After all, what significance does the drone have in their lives together and what role does it play for the two women? Although Hanna and Lilli include it in some situations and think about it, it takes on the subordinate role of a pet rather than that of an actual flatmate. Nevertheless, Little Pictures describes an almost intimate relationship between human and drone, which is revealed in particular by the unusual use of the technical device indoors and its narrator's voice and clearly deviates from the rather negative connotation of the drone as a distanced instrument of war, control and surveillance that has been established in the visual arts to date.

Exhibition text by Rahel Schrohe