Gitte Villesen

Vorbasse Horse Market and Fair (The Young One) (1995) presents the real and imagined elements of community life, a place where human intervention equates to a natural subversion of model spaces. Community provides a place for nostalgia of past generations with a shared connection through place, yet Villesen presents the other local; the psychological and unromantic. While her work as documentation for the future highlights the performative nature of being in front of a camera, it is the fictious element to all presentation.

In Vorbasse Horse Market and Fair, (The Young One), Villesen presents a familiar scene of loud music and crowds enjoying the excitement of fairground attractions on a Saturday evening, conjuring images of Bacchantic behaviour. Her position as a filmmaker is jutted by the intrusion of a young man, Martin, intent on maintaining her attention, and the playful actions of seduction take place. But Villesen’s role as cameraman complexifies the scenario. Because of the unplanned nature of the meeting with Martin, the film speaks pertinently of our instinctive communal behaviour within different situations. By taking on the traditional female role Villesen and the young man play out the gender games of flirting, but while holding the camera, Villesen also takes on the male role of storyteller. Meanwhile Martin’s instinctive desire to remain the active participant is both raised by Villesen’s responses and squashed by her position as camera-bearer over the course of the film, making for an entertaining, if not melancholic documentation of the spaces used for relaxation and revelry.

Villesen’s work rests between the documentary and art. Placing herself within the frame, she presents an almost anthropological perspective on the people she meets. Often presenting those seen as eccentrics within community, either through the display of traditional role playing in a story of lace-making in Katherine makes them and Bent collects them (1998), or by the obsessive collection of mementos from travelling such as Ingeborg the Busker Queen (1999), she witnesses the extraordinary to prove the ordinary of the local. Focusing on the traditions that communities create and dissolve as a forming of identity, she provides a glimpse into the social situations of community and social grouping, referencing the anecdotes that create our understanding of particular positions, and how objects take on a purpose as visual indicators of status. Her work asks what and where the collective is, and how much it is based on psychological understanding rather than instinct.

Vorbasse Horse Market and Fair (The Young One) acts as a pretext to Villesen’s other work, as well as to Martin’s life. We do not see objects collected over the years; instead the viewer is witness to a less planned event, where the subject enters production without prior knowledge of the true nature of what he is placing himself in. Having grown up in the village next door to Vorbasse, Villesen’s position as author is already subjective, able to go along with the event by use of dialect and body language in a world she understands. At times touching, funny and worrisome, the artist proves that the camera can reduce and amplify a situation of interaction and connotations of accepted social norms familiar to us. The camera acts as her shield from the events she is recording, placing her both psychologically and physically out of the local. We see Martin again in a game of Ludo (Three Times Ludo (Ludo 3),1995) playing against Villesen, and as with other work where Villesen returns to acquaintances from previous work, the role playing between artist and subject is developed. Each work becomes more emphatic toward the people she presents, allowing the viewer to notice the idiosyncrasies that build the subject’s character, while promoting the real and fictional relationship between people and video technology.

Seeming to allow events to unfold, Villesen suggests that she places her subject in control, while the nature of her work allows small snippets of personality, expressed through speech and body language, to surface. However, as author she takes full responsibility for the progress of the event referencing a facet of her work, which asks the meaning of the questions asked by the author. With her position as the final editor, she takes the control away from the performer and places it firmly with herself. But by placing herself within the frame, Villesen too is vindicated. Ultimately it is the viewer who is in control, adding the final position within the context of community.

Rebecca Harris

For further information on the local, see Olsen, Sanne Kofod, “Local Subjects and (Very) Private Politics,” in Wiener Secession Catalogue, Vienna, The Secession, 1999.