DIVIDED BY THE SEA,
CONNECTED BY THE OCEAN
Walter Seidl, 2021
Wolfgang Lehrner’s video Divided by the Sea, Connected by the Ocean comes from the series Medineo, which is divided into seasons and episodes and follows the scheme of a television series with its serial format. Medineo functions as a fictional city in a tv show or a novel, the name of which evokes a Mediterranean flair. This ethos exists independently of a concrete city and extends accordingly to the myths of the ancient Roman or Greek trading areas, such as the former Constantinople or Alexandria.
Situated in the present, yet conceived in a black and white aesthetic, the video is reminiscent of Mediterranean moments of the twentieth century film history and references influences of the Nouvelle Vague. At the beginning, the camera focuses on the eyes of a man sitting on a bench, looking towards the sea and contemplating the slow events. Subsequently, the sea, with its sounds, becomes the main protagonist of this short film. Discontinuous scenes appear on the screen and record people in static actions. In between, camera movements take place simultaneously on bus journeys, in which the view of fences, grids and barriers defines the dividing line between land and sea.
Without specifying the location, this is a definition of what a harbour city has to offer, or what those border areas between land and sea, which follow a ubiquitous design pattern, look like. Muezzin-like chants or a woman with a headscarf sitting by the sea suggest that it could at least be the south-eastern Adriatic coast, or in proximity to Turkey, where the border between the Orient and the Occident is established in terms of beliefs. The current of the sea becomes just as virulent as the journey over a bridge, with its barely perceptible outer grids in the shape of a cross. Recurring palm trees, buildings under construction, surfers and people mainly looking at the sea characterise that flood of images that correlates with the tide.
The fictional port city of Medineo stands for moments of arrival and departure, referencing a story that knows no starting or end point. Different perceptual schemes and subject constructions require a filtering of the found images and textures, whose ephemeral character emerges through the individual camera movements. According to Fredric Jameson, the changing experiences of space and time shape the post-modern and post-industrial subject, who experiences a loss of maps and, as a constant traveller, attaches less importance to the location of geographical points of departure and arrival than to the in-between. The journey is often only perceived in passing and draws focus to itself through the significance of visual, linguistic and cultural codes. Lehrner follows this scheme as a flâneur of images that may evoke different sets of associations for each viewer.
Walter Seidl, Videocity Basel, 2021