Marcel Odenbach &
Marcel Odenbach’s artistic involvement with the thematic complex of flight, displacement and loss of home is also defined by his own biography. The artist originates from a family with a history of flight, and he already occupied himself early on with questions of identity. Ständig auf dem Sprung sein was originally shown as a three-channel video installation on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995 in New York and Geneva. At this time, Marcel Odenbach lived partly in New York, where he had access to the film archive of the United Nations. For the single-channel version of the work, the artist collaged found historical film material and his own recordings there. »Of interest to me was that it [the found film material] was mostly uncut, meaning unprocessed, and thus provided non-censored insight«, according to Marcel Odenbach.
A symbolic leap to freedom opens the work; the iconic film recording of the spontaneous flight of a young GDR border soldier into the West, who jumped over an abatis of barbed wire of the just provisionally erected Berlin Wall in 1961. This is followed by shots of suitcases being packed, on the one hand a metaphor for departure and new experiences, on the other hand for war-related refugee movements, which do justice to the title of the work. We associate haste and restlessness, the permanent readiness to depart and the impossibility of abiding with the expression ›Ständig auf dem Sprung sein‹ (Always on the go). The restless moving on makes sense only as a continuous hope that we will at some point arrive at a place where we can reside and perhaps be able to remain. Accompanied by the sounds of the St Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach, the slower runners in a street marathon are left behind. Will they reach the goal? Given the current political migration debate, the work acquires an oppressive topicality. (Darija Šimunović)
