UNHEIM
2010 - 2-channel site specific video-installation within 2 40ft freight containers
datastream - stereo sound - 6min45s, in loop
“ Located on the wastelands of the CarriageWorks site, a vacated lot that merely revealed the ghostly remnants of a former building, Alexis Destoop unlocked some of the inaccessible, temporary spaces of the site, using freight containers that were situated behind cyclone fencing.
Unheim was a two-channel video and sound work influenced by Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1970), a description of a paradoxical limbo defined by the movement of its dwellers, and characterised by changing light conditions. His project transposed certain principles of the literary work into a cinematic process, whereby apparatus such as setting, lights and camera became the principal subjects.
From a particular location, viewers could perceive a continually unfolding space of corridors and doorways issuing from two portals, creating a sense of infinity within a hard, impenetrable casing., that challenged the notion of perspective and depth offered by the installation within the surrounding architecture. The footage augmented by Destoop was shot at night at laboratories in the heart of a derelict industrial site in Northern France that was impacted by a wave of deindustrialisation in the 1970s, which echoed the situation of the Eveleigh site, in its state of transition and becoming.”
Bec Dean , from the catalogue of “Nightshifters”, Performance Space @ Carriageworks , Sydney, 2011
The installation was conceived specifically for the exhibtion Nightshifters on the impressive formerly industrial site of Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia It constitutes Destoop’s the first work presented outside of the strict confines of interior spaces. The footage shot according principles of structural film, focuses on a labyrinthine enclosed interior which becomes the very “ protagonist’. The diptych forms a “negative” companion piece to the installation Dwelling.