Jogging

The concrete arena, fundamentally an instrument for channeling the most vital of functions, mutates into a slumbering giant between "invasions" on days of home games. On the off days, half-wild dogs enter its sleepy atmosphere and settle in as parasites.
Though jogging is constantly suggested by red sweatpants, it is never actually shown. On the contrary, the adrenaline level seems to have been calibrated in the car beforehand: The drive to the location of the putative action is condensed into an improvisation on bizarre and boring subjects, about a stadium, asphalt and stray dogs.
Contemplation and denial run through this work as constants of a message which treats film as a liberation strategy in a mediatized space - with a finale of repeated images in a dense musical monotony.

(Josef Dabernig)


Fragments of a story from the no-man´s-land. In Josef Dabernig´s Jogging, an anonymous driver behind a filthy windshield traverses an increasingly foreign landscape to the accompaniment of Olga Neuwirth´s captivating and piercing music. The journey through a faceless land of highways ends at an empty building which seems to have more in common with a flying object than a soccer stadium: futuristic realism, a minimalist musical of the third kind.

(Stefan Grissemann)


The stereo plays twentieth-century orchestral music composed by Olga Neuwirth as a car travels through a decrepit landscape marked only by unidentified communist architecture. The music, now haunting and pseudogothic grows louder as the skittish camera voyeuristically glances through the side view mirror, glimpsing the reflection of buildings hovering in the background, the driver’s hands and peering out the windshield from the backseat. The editing grows quicker as the collage of uncanny imagery increases, culminating in an overwhelming state of disquiet. The ultimate destination is Renzo Piano’s UFO-inspired Stadio San Nicola, built for the 1990 World Cup. The car suddenly stops and camera goes mad!

(Andréa Picard)


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