Fotograf Magazine

A woman walks down a path, gets into a car, gets out somewhere else, walks into a building and down a hallway into a sparsely furnished flat, looks out the window, sits down at a desk, leafs through some papers, smokes a cigarette, and upsets a glass of water. The telephone rings while she is cleaning up. She answers it, speaks, hangs up, picks up her things, leaves the flat, and finally turns to face the camera that has been following her.

Excerpt from the Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) annotation
in: David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, Kunstverein München, 1997.

David Lamelas based a large portion of his artistic work on classification, sorting and relaying information as part of gallery operations and his communications habits. His early gallery project, Connection of Three Spaces, dating from 1966 and rebuilt in an altered form in London (2011), attempts to express a space narrative consisting of the viewer’s individual experiences, where disparate perceptions in their initial connection create for Lamelas a work as a whole. As part of his installation at the Venice Biennale, Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio (1968), he printed the endless flow of wire service reports from the Vietnam War and hung them on the wall of the Lamelas’ Office of Information. Select reports were read to viewers in six languages and at the same time continuously archived on a tape recorder, so that they would later also be available in their audio format. Although the title indicates informing on several levels, with Lamelas‘ work and mainly for his subsequent film installations, it is more suitable to speak of several levels of experience with informing. None of his otherwise comparable works understand information in such a clearly-defined form as the telex reports from Italy’s ANSA Agency. Still however Lamelas‘ installations develop the possibility of a multi-layered process of communicating inside the gallery space.