“An Exile,” a video made only recently, reels off in the truest sense of the phrase a story that is unfortunately very common, and especially brutal for women—that of exclusion. Even after the necessities have been formulated, one usually encounters nothing but incomprehension.
But “An Exile” also tells the typical story of any expansion policy: people show an interest in others as long as there is a concrete reason. Within a self-contained hegemony, however, the “other” is difficult to accept as “one’s own.” If assimilation does not proceed in silence (on the part of the “newcomers”), then “the others”—who must fight for their fair share and for sheer visibility, because they do not enjoy this matter-of-course status guaranteed by bloodlines, gender, or national genealogies—can expect at the most the concession of being categorized as “not one of us.” Behind it all is a perfidious network of cruelty—not necessarily even cynical but merely blind, insensitive, and mute when it comes to the needs of other people.
The thread that comes loose from a dress is an allusion to numerous other works by Dertnig, while also marking a “home.” And laying a trail. Suggesting perhaps a feminist reinterpretation of a myth, it is this very thread running through the video that often distorts the commonly accepted, never challenged path of a strongly patriarchal majority society. At the same time, it unravels a whole space of experience that reveals the immense power of the “other” to find EVERYTHING new and be forced to choose her own name for it.
Carola Platzek