Magda Buczek
Girls
This project is about a girl –a female child.
It is an attempt to seize their unique aura, the result of research on the Internet, among the girls I know, and in my own memories. It’s a search for a unique mixture of cruelty and innocence, a state of a flow gained spontaneously during a child play ,and also a quest for the girls’ identity in general. I was not interested in an image of Lolita, so popular in male-dominated culture. Instead, I focus on a girl who carries a mystery, a medium.
The project incorporates amateur videos from Youtube as found footage. The videos are combined with studio photos, where models try to recall the situations showed in the films with their eyes shut. Despite having seen the videos before posing, the models were regaining their own memories rather than re-playing films, playing a film of their own childhood behind the closed eyes. The video displayed on the surface of a photo animates the images and multiplies their identity.
What is important is the usage of different media. Technical qualities like colour, pixels, material loss became a part of a project. The imperfect quality of a video resembles the imperfect quality of a memory.
The project also includes found footage photographs and a video record of a choir performance, captured with a tourist camera at Bernhard Wilhelm show in Mode Museum in Antwerp. This pin-up epilogue is my personal commentary to the idea of girlhood.
