THILO GARUS: The Echo of Two Diverging Whispers
The artist and director Thilo Garus will be presented for the second time at SAUERS with The Echo
of Two Diverging Whispers.
What do we remember when we separate from people or lose them? What remains in our memory,
and did it really happen as we remember it? Like the phenomenon mentioned by psychologists,
infantile amnesia, which leads to "fictional memories." Fragments of real, later memories are
linked with photos or stories that circulate within the family. Is this still the actual memory, or a
personal projection made up of our desires and expectations that has been seared into the memory
and become inseparably merged with it? Four people meet in different configurations and leave
each other again. They mostly appear individually in landscapes that speak about the state of the
soul.
Film as truth, and the artist, who edits and reassembles it according to his own chronology.
There’s something almost annoyingly intrusive in the frame: the loud drone buzzing when the
camera circles the subjects from a bird’s-eye view. In feature films, often a sign of impending
danger. The people in the film are unaware, but still somehow pressed by a melancholic mood.
There is something in the air. In contrast, soothing: the voiceover, a minimalist poem by Lian
Rangkuty, created for this work and leaving much room for personal interpretations and meanings.
It can be read on the back of this text.
This very personal film narrates two romantic relationships and a friendship of the artist. As a
director of short and fashion films, the aesthetics and visual language of familiar fashion spots
also flow into his artistic work. The partly grainy recordings in the video aesthetics of the 1990s
were not made at that time, but play with the temporal assignment.
The film was part of the Sellerie Weekend Berlin 2024.
Text by
HANS KRESTEL