Patrick Alan Banfield’s works often situate time-based media such as video within spatial installations. Making use of live-editing processes as well as sound composition, much of his work engages with the socialization of “nature” and the poetic of identity. At the 8th Berlin Biennale, Banfield shows the two-channel video and audio installation vyLö:t (2012) in which the struggle between human desire, the laws of nature, and the built environment is brought to the fore. On one screen, long-tracking shots of post-war concrete housing blocks highlight rigid architectural forms and somewhat menacing façades. Shot in Karlsruhe and Heidelberg, these views seem to underline the anonymity and isolation of urban life. By contrast, the other screen shows images shot in the Taunus, a mountain range in Hesse, north of Frankfurt. Here the chaos of organic forms -tree stumps, ragged rocks, wet soil and gnarled, exposed roots- seems to present the polar opposite of the cityscape; a vision of wild nature untouched and unencumbered by the demands of man, which brings to mind the German Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But at time the shots on both screens seem to merge, following the principle of camouflage, and thereby call into question any easy dichotomy between the built and the natural environment. The video is accompanied by a poetic soundscape (a collaboration with Sascha Blank), adding another atmospheric layer to the installation.

Text by Juan A. Gaitán