Notes on Being and Having a Body, 2017
video essay, 2:37 min
collaboration with Brenda I. Steinecke Soto

Cameras: Kirstin Burckhardt, Oscar Molina, Brenda I. Steinecke Soto
Editing: Hernan Arango & Oscar Molina

“Notes on Being and Having a Body” is a video essay by visual artist Kirstin Burckhardt and choreographer Brenda I. Steinecke Soto in the context of Burckhardt’s Artist in Residence stay at the Fundación Espacio Arte in Medellín (Colombia) from February – March 2017.

The video was shot in a burned warehouse for cosmetics – a space filled with mountains of melt lipstick caps, nail polish fumes, and charcoaled walls. The beauty products designated for altering bodies now merge into a landscape of large disfigured objects.

It is in this context that we introduce our filmic approach that is deeply related to the body and gaze: Strapping two GoPro-cameras to our chests, the process of image-making immediately relates to the movement of the bodies reacting to each other. In this way, the GoPro-cameras offer two co-dependent first-person-perspectives that we triangulate with the third-person-point of view of the observer’s camera: a game of many perspectives on and through bodies unfold in the collapsed house structures of a ruin.

These thoughts eventually translated into our subsequent project: own own body own

Thank you:
ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Hamburger Behörde für Kultur und Medien, Fundación Espacio Arte