A film

In her video works, the Swiss artist and photographer Marie José Burki explores how the visible can be classified, formatted and categorized. Burki sets out from observation and plays with audiovisual codes. The arbitrarily entitled A film wants and doesn’t want to be ‘a film’. Conceived deliberately for a projection room — i.e. not for an exhibition space — A film is entirely without narrative structure. It is rather a collage: an ebb and flow of impressions, images and sounds. Burki subverts the media relation between image and text: A film links scenes and shots of a landscape to sound and music, and above all to a conversation between a woman and a man. They are talking about the state of the environment and the disappearance of species. About the recent discovery of a body in a glacier and about Glen Gould. About ‘non-coincidental coincidences’. A film is an invitation to daydream, a reflective cocoon in which it is good to stay.