48 Western Magazines

Gitte Villesen’s video works have been telling stories, in a simple and unpretentious way, of every-day life and the personal and social circumstances of people she has met and whose personality, work, and life are of particular interest to her for a variety of reasons. She has incorporated the spontaneous and raw aesthetic of the home video into her work of unobtrusively and sensitively portraying people, and their pondering of life, personal memories and feelings.

As explained by her in a recent interview, she usually emphasizes two sides when talking of her works: an emotional one – related to the actual meeting with the person who is being filmed – with the construction of social relationships, norms, gender, sexuality, on the one hand, and the construction of the representation in itself – history writing, documentation, objectivity and subjectivity – with the question of who is allowed or privileged to have a voice, on the other. Whatever the content may be, the construction of the process of her works is always incorporated into the finished piece, as are reflections on the different encounters with people and the conditions in which these encounters take place.

48 Western Magazines presents Éva Molnár, the art director of the Fészek Club, who gave Gitte Villesen and Sebestyén Kodolányi a thorough guided tour last summer. The way she moves around the Club shows her strong connectedness to it, and reflects over 50 years of experience in working and living there – almost as if she, herself, had become the house. We hear Dóra Hegyi’s voice as she translates Éva Molnár’s recollection about how she managed to order international art magazines and books for the library of the Fészek Club during the Communist regime.

The work is a portrait of both Éva Molnár and the Club, but also reflects upon the process of translation and the situation of an artist being in between languages.