"The title of Marcel Odenbach’s video, Die Distanz zwischen mir und meinen Verlusten (The Distance Between Myself and My Losses), gives one a sense of the meanings hidden behind an enigmatic collage of images from various sources both recorded by the artist and from archives – gay pornography, war films and so on – that have been manipulated and broken up in order to construct a story about identity and memory. Odenbach uses a formal technique of alienation, masking the screen with horizontal and vertical black strips, allowing only partial details to be seen, so the complete image is kept hidden from the audience. This makes the viewer a voyeur, unable to make a literal, complete reading of the image, an experience that actively awakens desires, dreams and visions, a mechanism that helps complete the shaping of the work’s meaning. The stark contrast between these images and the soundtrack, consisting of fragments from Schubert’s romantic opera Der Erlkönig and Burundi funeral songs, cloaks the work with a ghostly, polytextual tone. Taken as a whole, this considerably complex creation is an attempt to appeal to the human subconscious from a number of juxtaposed viewpoints.
Lola Hinojosa" (Source, site web, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía)
"In this startlingly original and highly charged work, Odenbach locates the construction of self and identity in the realm of vision, creating an enigmatic memory theater of popular and historical representation. The Romantic opera of Schubert's Erl King alternates with Burundi funeral songs as the dark musical accompaniment to this inquiry into personal and cultural loss and desire. Using a formal distancing device, Odenbach masks the screen with horizontal and vertical bands of black, allowing the viewer the partially blocked vision of a voyeur. The fragmented slivers of visible images — archival footage that suggests a Leni Riefenstahl film, pornographic film, playing cards, ambiguous objects manipulated by Odenbach — are rendered even more provocative by the censoring force of the black bands. While the concealing panels frustrate vision, the elusive images that are revealed suggest the existence of another reality "beneath" the surface — memory? the subconscious? Odenbach positions identity in a tense relation to history, culture and sexuality, where the self is only partially visible and partially knowable." (Source, site web, eai)
