magine a sort of vagabondage, a long reverie. Imagine being plunged without warning into an image fl ux that seems to allude to a memory, a real lived experience which is nonetheless opaque, as if someone descended to the basement and after having brought up some old video cassettes begins watching them compulsively, mumbling a little, with the absent air of one of the great solitaries. And imagine this Beckettian character, a Krapp who has replaced the reels of his tape recorder with a VHS and now spends his days running around in a world shrunken to the dimension of a football match, watching those games engraved in our memories and those we have forgotten, a game of mirrors, time travel, the images and the voice superimposed, mixed, bouncing off each other like a visual stream of consciousness. Oliver Kahn, the fi lm that Steve Fagin directed in 2003, carries the name of the football player from Bayern Munich, but it isn’t a biography: we are more like witnesses of “an intermittence” in his memory, where the chaotic materials of his pervious life are interlaced. And it is through the superimposition of these fragments that we are led, as the artist puts it, “to deal with the issue of memory in this new age of stream video. The piece puts forward that memory is linked with “machines of vision” (also sound) and new machines of vision do not simply replace old ones, hence the overlap and confl ation in the piece among pre-cinema devices, Hollywood cinema, VHS recorded matches, toy camera diary, and stream video”.
Stefano Chiodi, Rome.

Steve Fagin
Oliver Kahn
Published October 2003

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