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Puppet Show Gallery/Café Emma T. |
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"In the night, when everyone is asleep, the puppets awake to life." – Children believe in this, and it seems natural to them. The pass-over from lifelessness to life is a magic moment. It is well-known from theatre, puppet theatre or from the stop-motion-technique in cartoon movies. In nature we can see this metamorphosis when a pupa turns into a butterfly. Robert Musil’s "tangle foot" (1914) was the inspiring text for the exhibited works. The fly-paper "tangle foot" is made of parchment, covered with sweet sticky paste, by which flies are fatally attracted. Once you get in touch with it, there is no escaping. We are witnesses of those little fly-catastrophes and very close to their agony. This war goes under the skin, under the shell – under the body dress. The patterns on the Vogue child dress remind of strategic drawings on battle plans. The paper dress made from parchment itself is a scene of death and, as a moth cloth, a symbol of resurrection as well.
This is the context in which the fairy-tale-like reanimations of usually lifeless puppet bodies should be seen. In the drawings, the puppet heads come so close to the paper surface that their breath seems to condense on it like dust. Other drawings show aloof puppet-beings in fabulous spheres as well as sceneries, snapshots of an animated Puppet Show.