March Ritt

March Ritt is a video travelogue of twenty chapters, recorded during Sluik/Kurpershoek’s journeys between Berlin and the Netherlands. The structure of the work is circular; with the video returning to the first chapter at the end. The clear-cut set-up seems to place the images directly into a thematic context. Nevertheless, the work does not provide a definitive answer to questions about the ‘story that belongs to the images’. It gives a hint here and there, but there is no clear-cut narrative. While some titles, such as Door schuldig landschap (Through a guilty landscape, chapter IX) refer to themes that occur more often in the work of Sluik/Kurpershoek – which inevitably places them in a certain context – others remain more mysterious, such as, Weg van het vuur (Road of the fire, [or possibly ‘Away from the fire’], chapter I) or Gerucht op gerucht (Rumour upon rumour, chapter XIII). These titles were borrowed from unknown soldiers’ autobiographical novels from World War I. They seem to point to a story that the viewer, as outsider, is not familiar with. In a certain sense this enigmatic content stimulates the watching and listening; behind each image, each sound and each fleeting impression we look for a ‘deeper significance’. Why precisely these flowers, that forest, this graveyard? Who are those children and that man? However, ultimately what we see is what we see in it: something that always acquires meaning by being placed in a specific context. In this connection it becomes clear that the artistic strategy behind March Ritt is based on a play on recognizability and alienation that makes the entanglement of those two moments visible.