| Katya Sander | e@katyasander.net |
| Love Is The Poetry Of The Mob with Christina Prip In ArtGenda, Helsinki, 2000. The 1950s modernist building, Laatsi Palasti, is located in the center of the city of Helsinki. On the ground floor, in the center of the building, there is a cinema. The audience enters the cinema from the street amidst the traffic, sound, and lights of Helsinki. After the film has been shown, however, instead of returning to the street, the audience exits the cinema through a doorway located just below the theater’s movie-screen. This passage opens out onto the backside of the building – a surprisingly calm area resembling a public square – partly used as a parking lot. It is this act of passing through the building, through the cinema, into the time and space of a movie, and ultimately through the projection-screen itself into a contrasting urban space, that we decided to address in this project.
A set of blue lights were added to the theater’s white lights, these blue lights would fade up at the end of the movie and upon exiting, viewers would find this same blue light in the parking lot, emanating from the street lamps there. Demarcating space by changing the light, we attempted to draw the movie-goers’ attention to the passage they had made from the self-effacing space of the cinema (built to make us forget our bodies and focus instead upon those images, made of light projected on the movie-screen, where we find space infinitely expanding and multiplying into new spaces of desire), back into a different space of the city. By shifting the color of the light illuminating the inside of the theater from white to blue, we were also suggesting a connection between the architecture and the projected film itself: that they both conspire to satisfy the desire or fantasy of dislocation – finding one’s self ‘elsewhere’.
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