Laura J. Padgett
2021SOLITAIRE
Laura J. Padgett
The found footage film SOLITAIRE is made from documentary film material of the late 1950s until 1972 from the archive of Hessian Rundfunk. We see Max Horkheimer buying newspapers, we hear Hannah Arendt talking about the mother tongue. We also see Frankfurt during the great construction boom of the sixties. We see demonstrations on the Römerberg and the presence of the Americans in the Federal Republic during the cold war. Housing shortages, urban development, youth, guest workers, consumer society: these topics are repeatedly seen in the Hessen Schau from these decades.
SOLITAIRE
Fragment
Laura J. Padgett
This film is a short study of the relation between language and visual experience. Reversal and negative takes are edited together, emphasising the quality of black and white film. The entire film was shot in one room. We hear bits of whispered text dispersed within the film, creating a sense of intimacy.
Fragment
Einige Orte Dazwischen (A Few Spaces In Between)
Laura J. Padgett
Recurring abstract and microscopic structures appear in this film that Padgett compiled from found footage for the exhibition Innocents Abroad—Made for Arolsen in Schloss Bad Arolsen. She used material culled from educational films produced during the ’60s and ’70s from the educational film archive at the University of Paderborn. Padgett worked with such source material as How Does the Wind Come to Be?, How to Lay a Table and Skin: Our Vulnerable Protective Barrier. Scenes of work on an assembly line or experiments in scientific labs reference a technical/scientific modernity. The film images reveal a historical dimension, while introducing layers of referential meaning and placing the film in relationship to our understanding of what we consider to be state of the art.
A Few Spaces In Between
