¹ The images used in Diorama Mechanica  (2005) I selected and cutted during a performance called Wunderkammer. The resulting images on the process of creation – I call them performéances -, are the residu of this performance held to invoke the spirit of creation. This performéance also resulted in a manifest-like text called Diorama ︎︎︎.

Diorama Mechanica

A diorama is a miniature world viewed through an opening—a staged reality that is both convincing and artificial. Mechanica refers to a mechanism: a device with moving parts, a machine that appears almost alive. The title of this work brings these ideas together: a diorama set in motion.

Diorama Mechanica (2005) is a jukebox of short animated video’s. Using a set of push buttons, visitors choose which animation is played. Each film is based on a historical medical photograph, brought to life through movement, sound and music.

A foot with eight toes wiggles to the rhythm of a tune. An embryo slowly revolves to the melody of a carousel. A spastically contracted hand moves with a quiet, searching rhythm, as if feeling its way through the darkness. The animations are deliberately simple, almost naïve: the movements are minimal, the music familiar. Yet their effect constantly shifts. At times they are playful, at others strangely unsettling, lingering long after they have ended.

What unites these films is the way they transform the medical image. Originally produced to document, classify and objectify bodily difference, these photographs briefly become something else: figures that move, respond and seem to possess a life of their own. For a moment, they cease to be objects of clinical observation and instead become presences with their own agency. The clinical gaze is suspended—if only for the duration of a single film.