Clara S Rueprich

Site-specific video installation for the exhibition Anlagenstillstand, Museumswinkel Erlangen/Germany.

(The installation was situated in the washroom of a former factory building. In the factory the washing and toilet facilities were only for men.)

Upon entering the former bathroom, the visitor sees a woman standing under the shower. Warm water runs over her skin.
From time to time she says something, as though talking to herself.
In front of the shower, a towel, shower gel and other articles have been hastily set down as if the woman had taken possession of the place as though it were a matter of course.
During the exhibition, the washroom is the passageway to the toilet, a public space, where the visitor can wash his / her hands. The installation transforms this public space into a private, almost intimate, zone.
The figure of the woman, filmed behind a translucent shower curtain at the same location and projected by a video beamer onto a further shower curtain, appears indistinctly.
Both the woman’s body and her language are naked. She speaks in unguarded words, spontaneous movements that don’t make the effort of becoming a text: Fragments of sentences, strewn among the burbling of the water.