Manon de Boer
Acquisition proposal

Manon de Boer
An Experiment in Leisure, 2016 – 2019
16 mm film transferred to HD video, color, sound
31 minutes 15 seconds
edition 1/5 and 2 A.P.

EUR 25.000 (excl. VAT)

An Experiment in Leisure (2016), which had its premiere in an exhibition setting at the Secession (Manon de Boer. Giving Time to Time, 2016), “is an attempt to translate the idea of aimless and open-ended time into film. In preparation for the project, de Boer exchanged ideas with friends—artists, choreographers, and theorists—about selected key terms in Milner’s work such as reverie, repetition, rhythm, and malleability. A series of sequence shots—long uncut takes recorded with a stationary camera—survey the vast deserted landscape of an island on different days but from an unvarying perspective. Slow tracking shots then direct our attention to details shown in close-up that bring abstract painting to mind, intercut with views of the workplaces of de Boer’s interlocutors: ateliers, dance studios, a library—oblique portraits of their denizens, who are present solely by virtue of their voices and the traces of their activities. The reduction to these calm and expressive pictures—some of the shots might seem like freeze-frames, were it not for subtle changes such as soft ripples on a water surface, a swaying curtain, or the play of light and shadow—slows perception down to the threshold of boredom to generate a state of heightened sensibility and wide-awakeness. The soundtrack consists of a continuous soundscape recorded as the artist was shooting in northern Europe. Now and then offscreen voices layer the natural sounds, fragments from the conversations about Milner, marking positions of a sort amid the constant abstract sonic flow that promotes the desired mental state of drifting and free association.”

(Secession, Vienna)

Manon de Boer
Caco, João, Mava and Rebecca (From nothing to something else, part 2), 2019
HD video, color, sound
48 minutes 15 seconds
edition 2/5 and 2 A.P.

EUR 30.000 (excl. VAT)

Caco, João, Mava and Rebecca follows 4 teenagers improvising with dance and movement. The camera follows each of them in long continuous shots, observing an intimate process of play and research into the body’s possible movements. The subjectivity of each dancer is made palpable through the closeness of their breathing, emphasized by the contrasting sounds of the outside world and the other dancers off-screen. As in the first and last part of the trilogy including also Bella, Maia and Nick (2018) and Oumi (2019), the film avoids building up tension and deviates from working towards an aim. Instead it explores the timespan between the already and the not yet, the time of potentiality.