Cubits | 03:33 | HD | 2014

In the video work Cubits, we as spectators are intruders on a private property with abandoned buildings from an apparently post-industrial era. Images of barren fields pass us by, a backdrop of mountain ranges in the distance, far from the green and Nordic, but which nevertheless seems recognisable. Corrugated tin and skeletons of warehouses remain as abandoned scenographies and the unheimliche is all-encompassing. The work's soundtrack also creates a sense of the unheimliche for the viewer, where a male radio voice reads from the book of Ezekiel, chapter 42, a passage in the Old Testament. Here, King Solomon's temple is described in detail and what separates the inner, sacral, from the outer in this pre-modern, symbolic building. Directly translated from German, unhemilch means "uncanny", and for Freud this means the barrier between the known and the unknown in what is hidden or out of reach. It is the very barrier that is the essence of the understanding of the space we move in. The radio voice is insistent and fast, and we wait to receive the admonition of how important it is to understand the meaning of the temple today, in this apparently dystopian present. The video piece ends in a sweep over the buildings, some cars and cracked asphalt, penetrated by nature taking over from man.