Reynold Reynolds, Six Apartments, 2007, two-screen video projection, loop, transferred from 16 mm film, 12 min. Courtesy of E31 Gallery, Athens.

Isolation and decay or rather, ‘realities of the city’, are the main subject areas that artist and filmmaker Reynold Reynolds bases himself on, in order to develop narrative spaces with psychological extensions. In the 12-minute video Six Apartments, 2007, just as in his former films (The Drowning Room, 2000, Burn, 2002, Sugar, 2005), space and dweller appear to be in a sense of mutual relationship, as they both seem to collapse through a long, static process, resulting in disintegration.

Using the language of cinema in Six Apartments — the work is actually a two-screen video projection loop transferred from 16 mm film — Reynolds juxtaposes strange, fragmented images of six different interiors and their isolated occupants that slide from one screen to the other in a way that tends to confuse what is real and what is dreamed. The video pans and the pictures fade in and out of view, while leaving their traces on the viewer’s memory.

On both screens of the video-projection one detects parallels between characters, spaces and situations. They either make comparisons or foreshadow the future, while the paired images seem to reflect one another as if before a distorting mirror: the young woman reflecting the image of the old one, the freezer with the food in disintegration reflecting, as well, the mirrored image of the junky sinking into delusion. The viewer makes associations of ideas. Possible affinities between himself and the dwellers provoke a sense of dismay.

At first sight, the six apartments appear equally suffocating and dingy, as if they are allegories of the secret passages of the soul, of the inner-self. You have the impression that somehow they become the ‘dark, unexplored room’ of the unconscious, as Rosalind Krauss describes it as ‘a reflection of the repressed feelings’. There is a strong connection between the material and the spiritual. Similarly, the domestic space is treated as an entity. Both the bodies and the building are in a state of conversion and erosion, recalling the romantic tradition and particularly a notable phrase by Victor Hugo: ‘The house, like man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is enough to kill it. Then it is terrible.’

On the other hand, Reynolds’ gaze invades the ‘private’ almost anatomically. The use of set up spaces also contributes to the process of the detailed circumscription of the different domestic atmospheres. Whilst there is an absence of drama, the passivity of the characters conceals an unsettling, inner tension. Behind this stagnant situation the occupants’ fears, anxieties and syndromes become apparent. Everything that ought to have remained secret (‘heimlich’) comes to light. The latent manifests itself after the dream processes, in a daily routine that after all has become rather uncanny (‘unheimlich’).

You soon realise that the tenants of his apartments are surrounded by a deadly atmosphere that they seem to ignore. More precisely, they emerge as the form of erosion and decline. And just as Reynolds prescribes the situation through his work, you think that it is all about a ‘grueling decline, without hope for a possible exaltation’, to use the words of Greek writer Stefanos Rozanis.

In the primordial myth the evolution of humanity results in its disintegration. The ‘end of childhood’ is followed by the acquisition of knowledge and hereupon the feeling of anxiety as the final corruption. The six tenants are trapped in an internal confinement. They resemble their pets, the spider caught in the glass, the snake in the cloche, the bird in the cage … According to a description by Nietzsche, they become ‘the animal that they want to tame and throw about furiously on the rails until hurt … ’ In a reality like this, Reynolds’ heroes are left up to their own devices, in as much as the city turns out to be ‘full of absence’.

Still, in such a deadly atmosphere the potential for life still exists. Bacteria and minute organisms, produced by corruption, emerge. Reynolds interprets the situation according to the notions of hylozoism. Organic and inorganic seem to be in a perpetual motion of alternation. Body and soul, life and death, human and material are related in an analogous manner of symbolic exchange. Perhaps Jean Baudrillard was right after all: ‘In the symbolic universe there is always reversibility.’


Translated from Greek by Matina Charalambi.