Droomadom

All of us know the feeling of slowly drifting off to sleep during a train journey. And thus the beginning of Luzia Johow’s video work Droomadom seems hypnotic and familiar at the same time. While dark landscapes fly by past the compartment windows, the rhythmic rattling of the wheels on the tracks lulls you to sleep. Here, gradually, the familiar sound is electronically distorted and a red pulsating body appears in the window.

The landscapes that Luzia Johow’s film then creates through various techniques – with keyed-in excerpts of found footage and painted animations – are emotional landscapes. As in dreams, the aim is not to precisely capture these spaces, but rather a feeling they represent. In the background, a woman’s voice reports on dream moments that manifest themselves in her memory.

One of these moments is a variation on Freud’s motif of the embarrassment dream, in which one is exposed in one way or another. Luzias Johow’s dreamer has too many suitcases, all of which are open and are rummaged through by fellow travelers in a hastily blurred sequence. How much personal information do you reveal when traveling, and in general? What do you show, and what do you hide? Which thoughts and memories do you have at the top of your luggage, and which are hidden at the bottom? And above all, at the end of a journey, are you still the same person as when you set off?

In fact, it was her train journeys between Belgium and Austria that inspired the filmmaker to create this work. She studied directing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK). “Droom” is the Flemish word for dream, and the title onomatopoeically reflects the rhythmic rattling over railroad ties that runs through the film as a leitmotif: “Droomadom … adom … adom … adom”. (Maya McKechneay)

Translation: John Wojtowicz