D'est, au bord de la fiction [From the East: bordering on fiction]

Chantal Akerman

1995

Installation, 01:47:00.
Materials: 25 monitors, colour, sound, 48 speakers

Collection: Courtesy of the artist & Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York.

D'Est is based on Chantal Akerman's travels through Central and Eastern Europe between 1991 and 1993, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is the story of a journey to East Germany in spring, to Poland and Ukraine in summer, and on to Moscow in winter. In the resulting 25-part video installation, D'Est: au bord de la fiction, the documentary footage is grouped in eight triptychs according to certain formally harmonious patterns. On a concluding 25th screen, the filmmaker can be heard, talking off-screen about the project's motives. D'Est contains all the ingredients that make it Akerman's best known work in the film/video installation art genre: the interplay between documentary and fiction; travelling shots versus static shots; an interest in the aesthetics of time and duration; clinical observation and atmospheric musings; portraits of landscapes, cities and people, many of them seen waiting.

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