Anna Gohmert
Changing Years [Wechsel Jahre]
Video Colour, 26:04, HD, 2021
Language: German
Subtitles: English
Audio description: German
The film focuses on hormonal cycles that mark the different phases of women’s lives: Thus, it may be just as challenging to be vulnerable to the mood and hormonal changes of one’s menstruation as it is to the hormonal changes of pregnancy, menopause, or the time after – when suddenly these hormonal rhythms that have become familiar are gone. In her cinematic narrative the artist follows the question: “Am I as a woman still desirable, even though, according to the seemingly animalistic laws of nature, I no longer smell of procreation?” The filmic search for answers is accompanied by a pigeon from which the artist repeatedly takes away the eggs to prevent it from reproducing. Voices of a gynecologist, the artist’s mother, a shaman and a young mother – who used to work in a pigeon loft to organise birth control – appear in the film. The experimental imagery consists of pigeons, documentary material and archival footage and uses them to construct counter-narratives about “femininities”, ageing, self-determination, and animal-human relations.
Anna Gohmert
Changing Years [Wechsel Jahre]
Video Colour, 26:04, HD, 2021
Language: German
Subtitles: English
Audio description: German
The film focuses on hormonal cycles that mark the different phases of women’s lives: Thus, it may be just as challenging to be vulnerable to the mood and hormonal changes of one’s menstruation as it is to the hormonal changes of pregnancy, menopause, or the time after – when suddenly these hormonal rhythms that have become familiar are gone. In her cinematic narrative the artist follows the question: “Am I as a woman still desirable, even though, according to the seemingly animalistic laws of nature, I no longer smell of procreation?” The filmic search for answers is accompanied by a pigeon from which the artist repeatedly takes away the eggs to prevent it from reproducing. Voices of a gynecologist, the artist’s mother, a shaman and a young mother – who used to work in a pigeon loft to organise birth control – appear in the film. The experimental imagery consists of pigeons, documentary material and archival footage and uses them to construct counter-narratives about “femininities”, ageing, self-determination, and animal-human relations.