About Secrets What is a secret? What would you rather keep to yourself? How much are you willing to negotiate for what you have kept hidden? How do you resolve to share it? In the space of a 1-hour film and 9 hours of images shown back-to-back, 300 secrets of a most intimate or amusing, dramatic or childish nature are recalled and told by subjects who have willingly been drawn into the game of selling secrets. Collected and traded in an installation realised in Switzerland and France, they show us a snapshot of our own doubts, shames, mistakes and passing fancies.
Secrets For Sale – Synopsis Secrets For Sale is the film which reveals the radical ADN/ARN (Any Deal Now / Any Reality Now) experience. ADN/ARN was an interactive installation addressed to one person at the time, in which each visitor was invited to confide and then contractually sell (anonymously on demand) a personal secret. The installation was composed of four units: the waiting room, the preparation sieve, the studio and the cabinet. The visitor/actor followed the protocol of the system under the scrutiny of eight surveillance cameras. In the cabinet unit, after the recording, Elodie Pong stepped in as a performer, negociating the price of the secret according to her interest in adding it to her collection.
Elodie Pong Elodie Pong (born in 1966 in Boston, USA) is a Swiss artist and filmmaker known for her subtle, analytic works, often built as cycles or in series, which focus on human relationships, cultural codes and their impact on contemporary society. As a university-trained sociologist and anthropologist, she often deals with social structures in her artistic work. The wide-ranging oeuvre of the video artist revolves around questions of identity and collective identity construction, intimacy and separation, self stylization and unstable communication situations in a pluralistic and individualized society. Until 2004, her projects, installations and video works mainly focused on immediate visualisation of sociological structures such as intimacy, friendship, issues of gender and communication. Her more recent films can be read as multi-layered analysis and deconstruction of these very themes, where the viewer becomes part of the constellation by being offered different readings according to which the works are brought together. Elodie Pong has received several awards and grants; her work is exhibited in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
Quelle Text «Secrets for Sale» und Bilder: www.elodiepong.net
Quelle Text Biographie www.transmediale.de