sonotope platform

Even before the image lets us in, via black film we get a few crucial clues about the property from a dialogue between two women. The apartment of the Viennese artist and architect Heinz Frank (1939–2020), which is then traversed bit by bit in grainy, color-intensive 16mm recordings, is one of a kind: in the entrance area there is a free-standing enamel bathtub; behind curtains, all of the rooms open up. The eye is quickly drawn to details: corners, edges, fittings, hatches – and reddish-brown lacquer paintwork with wood grain.

The pattern roller as the solution to this riddle is shown to us immediately afterwards. The height of the color applied was tailored to match the height of the resident; his daughter, Lilli Breuer-Guttmann, continues to tell the filmmaker in the voiceover that the apartment was his “third skin”. It turns out to be correspondingly adaptable: walls can be moved laterally or set at an angle, ample work surfaces can be folded out along the window side, and a staircase made of stacked cubes leads upstairs to a storage area. In built-in cupboards and drawers, everyday objects, artistic works, and ornaments await.

The interest in and the sense for the enigmatic, the ambiguous, the multifaceted, for surprising views and hidden functions run through the cinematic architectural studies that Sasha Pirker has been producing for around fifteen years. Things are not only shown, but literally grasped. Pirker’s most recent film is also characterized by its dramaturgical clarity – gewesen sein wird / will have been works as a cheerful tour through this apartment, as an insight into an artistic practice and into a daughter-father relationship. For nearly seventeen minutes we hear, we see, and then we understand something about how everything here is connected. Here is a film that is self-explanatory in the best sense of the word. (Isabella Reicher)

Translation: John Wojtowicz
www.sixpackfilm.com