Five monitors placed one above the other in a wooden column each separately show different parts of a woman's body in close-up: feet, pubis, breasts, arm and mouth. Black-and- white images, very slow movements, video without sound – this work refers us as much to primitive cinema as to Friederike Pezold's wish to go against what recent technologies offer and, probably, what forthcoming technologies will be proposing: the development of ever greater speed, in both the making and reception of images. This immense slowness, and the absence of any accompanying and peripheral sounds, are striking for their radicalness, because they point to a stubborn refusal of the predominant audio-visual model in our societies. Quite to the contrary, Friederike Pezold suggests that we focus on simple bodily attitudes, small mouth movements, the chest breathing, legs shifting, all physical gestures first and foremost trying to hold our eye. By focusing on this fragmented body and its slowness, it is we ourselves who are making a halt, with our perception becoming subject to the kind of minimal but hypnotic dance of breasts, lips and big toes which are nevertheless not doing anything surprising. Or rather are: we see them move as if in a “form of tai-chi for the eyes” (F.P.), a formula which is not just metaphorical, since we must literally follow a body's slowness with slowness. While we don't pay any more attention to our own body when we look at films, so much does the thing seem to us to pass only through our eyes, by way of its calmness and its distended time-frame, Friederike Pezold's work suddenly reminds us that our body is all the same present in the way we look at the column. So we have to make an effort of mental and physical concentration not only to accept that the body's movements can be slowed down, but also that our body and vision are also swathed in an extremely keen, yet tiny and simple attention, which is in the final analysis our real rhythm. But Friederike Pezold does not present us just with an “electronic goddess” with bewitching body movements trying to reduce the speed of perception and thought so that we may simultaneously observe it better and better self-perceive ourselves; she also mixes painting and sculpture in a work apparently stemming from new images. Needless to say, painting and sculpture are in motion. But the simple hint of the title as well as the movements of the woman certainly make us think of Klimt's pictures and Rodin's sculptures, and the works of many other visual artists, not so much because of the actual forms of the electronic model's body, but because of the slowness (and not the fixedness) evoked by this sort of work.

Jacinto Lageira

Translated by Simon Pleasance