Introduction

This kind of comedy – rooted in chance and in a naïve, traditional desire – tends to de-evaluate the concept of luck in favour of that of fate.  

– S. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 1954

243. Interior, daylight. M.P.P. Palace. Edmund stares out of the window,
then closes his eyes and throws himself out. Noise of a tram passing by. Music. 
– R. Rossellini, Germany – year zero, 1947

Ein Blonder Traum (A Blond-haired Dream) is a comedy directed by Paul Martin, taking place in pre-Hitlerian Germany; I used the title as a caption to multiply Edmund thirty times inside an almost-closed space. 

Edmund, in Berlin, commits parricide and hurls himself into void; thus I wanted to subject him to a multiplication. The blond-haired dream, at a premature age, throws himself out of the window in a destroyed Berlin. His gesture is light and poetic, devoid of any rhetoric. My attempt is to enact extreme situations using anonymous contemporaries with precise looks: multiplying Edmund into young girls wearing too-yellow artificial hair, or having Anne Wiazemsky with electric-red hair. These are extreme examples, fictitious characters or fakes of a character. 

The lying man – R. Robbe-Grillet 

The big thief – J-L. Godard 

Anne Wiazemsky is a Maoist-Leninist in 1967 with too many enemies to shoot; Edmund is a murderer and, still young, commits suicide. 

I watch girls in the streets and I try to imagine them as possible interpreters for roles they do not know of, but which they reveal through their somatic tracts or their position in space while walking; sometimes I feel as if I had already seen them in some paintings or movies. Some faces have the responsibility of a drawing, are as important as a portrait. Young girls are the mediating term I feel the closest to, for the time being. 

In The woman on the beach Jean Renoir tells the story of a painter that, having lost his sight, has other people to describe him reality. At Schipper & Krome in Cologne the image taking place in space was visible from an opening, a painting-window, like a frame of a movie closing access, forcing to a partial view that I perceived as bi-dimensional. It was a hint for a point of view, and as brief in time as a hint can be. 

These characters-drawings leave a trace in seven books, containing partly erased pencil drawings.

– Vanessa Beecroft, 1994