Mark Raidpere
Majestoso Mystico. Stockholm – Tallinn 26.04.07
Artist | Mark Raidpere |
Year | 2007 |
Duration | 13:53 min |
Edition | 6 |
Technical info | 2 channel installation, screen, monitor |
Contact | |
About the video
Mark Raidpere's video-installation "Majestoso Mystico" (2007) is rather an untypical piece. Raidpere has earlier made a reputation for himself focusing on the circle of people closest to him. His earlier works have almost always bordered on personal intimate confessions and can, even if the camera actually looks at the prisoners of Tartu Penitentiary or a strange old man he has spotted from his window, be considered as an indirect self-portraiture.
Evolving from a longer residency period in IASPIS Open Studios in Stockholm Raidpere intended to work on rather a subtle an intervention into the otherwise almost clinically clean cityspace of Stockholm. He wanted to find some local street musicians who could play Howard Shore´s soundtrack of the "Silence of the Lambs" for his video - a piece of music with rather discomforting associations, which had haunted him for quite a while. It is not at all irrelevant to the final outcome of the installation to introduce briefly the street musicians the artist finally got to work with. Ivan Shumilov, a Russian emigree to Stockholm, had some 15 years ago played in Hortus Musicus, the internationally reclaimed Renessaince Orchestra from Tallinn and his partner Björn Svensson, who involuntarily gave a name to the piece by scribbling to the score paper the tonality of the intended performance - "Majestoso Mystico". We could add that after a while they all, an Estonian video artist, Russian soprano recorder player and a Swedish block-flute player all communicated in Russian. As Ivan, atypical Russian in this sense had never really bothered to study a language of his new home country, it was Björn who had taken some Russian courses indeed. Finally the day of their performance, April 26th turned out to be significant. At the same time when the artist was filming calm streets of Stockholm spiced up with a catchy tune of a horror film, there was a violent riot taking place on the streets of Tallinn - an outcome of a quarrel between Russian speaking youngsters and Estonian police. The event, the so called Monument Scandal, which was triggered by Estonian Goverments plan to remove a World War II memorial with a Russian soldier from the city centre to a military cemetery of Tallinn, definitely caused a major shift in the local mental climate. The concerned artist who couldn´t be present at the historic moments and who returned to his hometown a few days later, still facing streets with the smashed shopping windows, started to work on the material. In his 2 channel installation he uses the images filmed from Stockholm and TV footage from Tallinn. The connection between synchronical scenes in two cities representing so different political realities are stressed on barely visible interpersonal level - in the nervous hand-writing of the music score scribbled out by Björn.