Interior Season, 2016, begins without a picture and with the only brief monologue in the film series. A man close to the artist, her stepfather, delivers a short introduction during a concert and begins to play a slow melody on his lute. In parallel, we have rhythmically repeating pictures of tablecloths spread out on a hotel bed. Accompanied by singing, the tablecloths are replaced by shots showing a juxtaposition of palms, rain forest and various tropical cityscapes. A short sequence filmed from a car, and a view over New York, convey the impression of travel and expanse. The stepfather’s nostalgic lute-playing fades into mystical staccato sounds, followed by pictures of an overgrown abandoned swimming pool in a garden along with infrared shots of piled-up pillows and mattresses in a confined space. The music — as if borrowed from an aliens film — remains dominant, and there follows, almost until the very end of the film, a rapid succession of pictures of unmade hotel beds. In this rapid sequence a number of portraits of sheets, blankets and pillows develop into the shapes of bodies and living structure, while their visual context and their original function visibly blurs. The music is inconspicuously supplemented by a grating electric guitar, with the stepfather’s singing partly mixed in. The pictures focus on almost picturesque-looking creases and wads that seem to meander over the beds. While the pictures continue, the singing of a group of children and their teacher starts up, and it is not until the final take that the beds are left behind and we see a raccoon on the edge of a lake. Interior Season deals with questions of ‘Heimat’ and ‘dépaysement’, correlating identity and family and fusing the media of film, photography and performance.
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