Lydia Hannah Debeer

alexandra

Lydia Hannah , video , Alexandra

single screen video with sound, 03’31”

Alexandra | 2016

Alexandra is a film made almost entirely out of stills. The camera circles around a woman standing on a balcony in Walden 7 while gradually closing in. When the daylight fades, the camera stands on the verge of touching her skin. It’s only through the sequence of these stills, that it becomes clear she is standing there watching the sunset.

I was introduced to the Walden flat in Barcelona by Alexandra, a resident of the building. Because I was not allowed to wander through the hallways alone, she guided me on every subsequent visit. Shadowing me when I filmed, always a few meters behind, watching me look at the building.

“[...] The beholder’s stand and body is the centre in Alexandra. There the subject is a woman who stares towards the horizon from Walden 7, a building located in Barcelona’s outskirts, that remains as one of the final attempts of architecture to align with the social utopias of the 20th Century. The comedy is replaced here with a more elegiac tone, when Debeer’s camera starts to circle around the woman, surrounding her body within such a labyrinthine architecture. A building from which a new kind of community was expected to burst forth has simply become a maze where the subject’s gaze is yet again retained.”

- Lydia Debeer. The Posthuman Gaze by Oriol Fontdevilla ↳ full text