Limbo Land (2001)
Single screen video with sound
10 mins 40 secs[performers: Lucy Tillet, Janet Hewlett-Davies, Dermot Kearney]
♦
In Limbo Land a sound recordist attempts to select the appropriate acoustic fragments of her field recordings in order to accompany imagery which suggests a loss and the leaving of a bodily realm in order to float across a series of winter landscapes. Despite the apparent disconnection between the source of the sounds and what we are seeing a new atmosphere evolves through these coincidences and chance juxtapositions. As with much of Chodzko’s work Limbo Land appears to reveal a state of impasse, of things falling apart, which simultaneously allows the opportunity for rebuilding something new, the work appearing to be making itself as we witness it.
The sound recordist’s voice-over:
“Hi, yes…I just thought I’d tell you that I don’t really understand what you want.
I couldn’t really understand what you meant; Something to do with an ending? …Something having gone? …The flight of something?
…So, I’m just imagining how it looks.
And I’ve just been listening to some sounds,… they are suggestions really, some possibilities; stuff I’ve been collecting.
None of them seem to be right at the moment.
I don’t know.
Maybe I misunderstood something.
I’m listening to the last bits now and then I don’t really know what else I can do. Hope that is ok…..bye.”Limbo Land (along with A Plan for a Spell (2001) ) were both created from Chodzko’s experience of his father death and, less than a year later, the birth of his first son. A focus on chance, loss and the occurrence of ‘beautiful combinations of events apparently accidentally in sequence’ evolved from a period of creative impasse from the overwhelming mixture of feelings of love, chaos and confusion, experienced in the process of a death and imminent birth.
Excerpt from: Brian Dillon ‘No Right of Light or Air,’ Annual, Kent Institute of Art and Design, pp.19–34:
In Limbo Land, sound is as impenetrable as space, as involuted as the passages and clearings through which the camera advances: ‘I don’t really know what you want’, declares the ‘sound recordist’ tasked with matching the images which it seems she has not seen. She essays a soundtrack out of ‘stuff I’ve been collecting’, mere fragments which match haphazardly the patterns of rocks and discarded clothing discovered by Chodzko’s camera as it drifts over the frozen earth of a nameless forest. In geological (as well as, perhaps, aesthetic) terms, these are ‘erratics’: the detritus left by the ruinous advance of a glacier, pointing the way towards a narrative of some kind, but in themselves foreign, exiled, silent.♦
Related works:
A Place for ‘The End’ (1999)
Plan for a Spell (2001)
The Pickers (2009)
Reunion; Salò (1998)
Yet (2005)
Nightvision (1998)
