Copa & Sordes

Concrete and Flowers - So ne Chääs

Videoinstallation

Radialsystem V, Berlin 2009

Museumsnacht, Kunstraum Riehen 2010

Copa & Sordes is an art project by Birgit Krueger and Eric Schmutz, Switzerland. Our projects are investigations into the space in between art and everyday life, high and low art. The center of our interest are „human conditions“, that means all the little things making a culture what it is, like food, work, fashion.
So we developed a way of real time documentation in the form of video still lives (see more under Newton’s Archives of Time www.xcult.org/copaetsordes)

Concrete and Flowers
how to continue traditions into postindustrial times

a video installation about the production of cheese in Switzerland
An invitation by the curators of the festival „Schweizgenössisch“ at the Radialsystem V in Berlin in August 2009 was the initial kick off for the production of the video installation „concrete and flowers“.

Concrete and Flowers, Kunstraum Riehen, 2010

So ne Chääs, Radialsystem V, Berlin 2009

The installation consists of several TV-monitors (3-12) with video still lives, which show different views into the cheese production in Switzerland. It enables an observation of the working processes in real time.
The production was supported by the Cantons Baselstadt and Baselland, Switzerland and the Ernst Göhner Foundation.

Introduction
Cheese represents Switzerland in the full range of „Heidiland“ romantics and economical-industrial interests.
Cheese is more than „Fondue“, mass-production for export and daily food. It is a product you will find a surprising coexistence of old traditional crafts and industrial production.
This relation is a central theme in our work.
The English title “concrete and flowers” plays with the double meaning of the word “concrete”, on one hand meaning a mass you put into a form, like in the cheese production, and on the other hand the dominant construction material of urban architecture.
Flowers are reminding a pastoral scene and by the same time they are just food for cows.

Still Lives as Documentary Observation
The video still lives of Copa & Sordes relate with their documentary view to the European tradition of painting. Arrangements of object in the foreground are linking the production processes in the background with the real world of the observer. They reflect the tension between tradition and industrial technology.
The videos follow principals of image composition you find in the classical still lives from the 17th and 18th century. The iconographic tradition of painting is continued in the time related medium of the video.
The historical still lives with their arrangements of objects with their symbolic and metaphoric meanings can be interpreted as a precedent of installation in contemporary art.
Some of the objects and textiles in the video still lives show drawings and short texts. The texts can be read as a kind of haiku, commenting the scenery and linking the different still lives together in an associative way.
The videos are taped with a fixed camera during one hour. They document the working procedures in real time.

Dramaturgy of Simultaneity
The dramaturgy of the documentation is not realized by cuts and the sequencing of scenes, but by the juxtaposition of the different steps of production. So they can be observed in real time just like the view trough the window into a factory hall. The observer has the possibility to follow up the work in its full duration.

Linking Reality and Virtuality
The videos are shown on up to 12 monitors (quantity variable), which are arranged to some kind of still live. Some of the objects represented on the screens are also present in reality, like a piece of cheese, a towel or a bowl. They link the virtual video image to the reality of the observer.

The Videos

12 Video sequences were produced; they can be combined in different constellations
Formant: Mini DV Pal 4:3
Master: Mini DV Pal
Screening copies: DVD-R

Every sequence documents 60 minutes of a working process filmed with a fixed camera in real time without cut.

do you believe in economy

The 91 years old farmer takes care of his four cows in a little village near the famous tourist destination Gstaad. His work is out of any economical rationality.

Gsteig near Gstaad, Berner Oberland, Canton Bern

Things are delicately interconnected

A picturesque landscape, cowbells are ringing. You observe cattle grazing in front of the oldest nuclear central of Switzerland. A young bull tries desperately to get on his cows.

View from Salvisberg to Mühleberg, Canton Bern

only the concrete will cross the ocean

This cheese factory produces the “Emmentaler” for the Japanese market.
For this reason all the installations have to fit with the strict Japanese food laws.

Käserei Neudorf , Canton Luzerne

there is another universe

Milking robot in the Bern sea lands

BZG Wiler, Seedorf, Canton Bern