Een Gebeuren

Directed by

Philipp Gufler

The video installation „Een gebeuren“ is based on Ben d’Armagnac’s performance of the same name, which took place in Amsterdam on 14th June 1975. D’Armagnac occupied a glass cube with the dimensions of about 2x1x1 metres, painted white from the inside, together with about 2,000 freshly hatched flies; he began to scrape off the paint centimetre by centimetre in order to at least partially reveal the cube’s inside for the spectators. Gufler reconstructed d’Armagnac’s performance based on rudimentary documented material and conversations with d’Armagnac’s partner Louwrien Wijers. In his own version of “een gebeuren,” Gufler captures the events with a GoPro camera. Instead of documenting the slow appearance of a person behind a white surface the video shows the diligent process of laying bare and opening up from an inside perspective – an action, which Gufler completes by releasing the flies at the end of the performance and by which he also upgrades d’Armagnac’s own performance.