Insideout

Date: 2010
Length: 25:00 min.
Format:  4:3
Specification: Colour, Sound

The Internet is an almost-limitless source of videos, so choosing amongst them is a special challenge for video works using found footage, because it is more difficult than picking motives from cinema films. Tonje Alice Madsen combines snippets from YouTube clips that she splices together in short sequences, creating a kaleidoscopic view on life. However, the dark and pessimistic side comes to dominate the video as it unfolds: from sunrises and a man listening to Dixie music while cleaning a window, to contemplations of the unpleasantness of daily life in Serbia, and finally to a man, alone in the nighttime, pouring his heart out to the camera. All are radically subjective contributions that get more and more personal and that weave a spell over their viewer. Ultimately, each piece is about loneliness. There are no picture-post card themes and the heavily pixellated images lend a painterly quality that emphasizes their authenticity and credibility. The video is classically bookended by a prologue - with a woman picked out by ghostly lighting - and an epilogue that have as their leitmotif “I tell the stories […] and thereby free myself” and “These videos are maybe my last chance to leave something behind.” 

GE