VDB TV

Doldrums: On the Uncanny Domestic

Programmed by Elise Schierbeek | 1981 - 2014 | TRT 01:10:00

Video Details
Stephanie Barber | 2010 | 00:02:05 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

The interior was delusional like any visual psyche. The couches and plants, rugs and paintings were all in cahoots and up in arms over the cahootery. The explorers were under-qualified and cowardly.

These interiors — the photos hung on the walls, the furniture and rugs, houseplants and televisions — are collaged from photos of various domestic items from Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian homes brought together to suggest one continuous home. I'm interested in the tension between the visible and the invisible cultural markers represented here. The British parade matted into the televisions, the Japanese musician and Ethiopian music exaggerate this collision.

 

— Stephanie Barber

Originally created for Milwaukee International with The Suburban's exquisite corpse video for the "No Soul For Sale" show at the Tate Modern.

About this program:

Video Data Bank is pleased to present the VDB TV program Doldrums: On the Uncanny Domestic, programmed by Elise Schierbeek, VDB's Digital Collection and Media Manger. As spring awakens, the program takes us to blue skies, sunny subdivisions, and back indoors to feel something beneath it all.

Taking a cue from the evocative title of Stephanie Barber’s The Hunch that Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily, this 70-minute program drifts through six works that rest on a sense of dread and eeriness within the home and suburban domesticity. Through varying modes, each work deals with a rupture of "the doldrums." Often, this takes the form of revealed contradictions – a haunting within the comfortable, an instability within the ordered. Works by Stephanie Barber, Cam Archer, Bob Snyder, Frédéric Moffet, Cecilia Condit, and Michael Robinson are included. 

Elise has also written an accompanying essay that explores the relationship of the program to the concept of the uncanny and its psychoanalytical origins in ideas of home and video. The essay is available to read here.