Dominique Müller
Designer FH Visual Communications, Video, Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts
MA CAP Fine Arts, Bern University of the Arts

Fabian Wegmüller
Designer FH Visual Communications, Video, Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts

Video Noir
Bändlistrasse 30
8064 Zürich

A super hero is preparing for a boxing match. But from the first blow he falls into a trance-like state; from melancholy to self-abandonment. An initially uncontrolled flailing about configures into heroic poses and demonstrations of might, only to collapse into the emotional states of an exhausted monstrous body.

Feet are turned inwards, heads cricked, the movements are edgy and abrupt, they tremble in a stamping chorus; a ritual sacrifice until death through exhaustion.

An essay film about the Jewish contribution to German culture between the two world wars.

What is female, what is male?

A video installation made from excerpts from porn movies that are showing only women and transgender people in supposedly male roles. A confrontation between irritation and fascination.

'The Gotthard is a place of myths and legends, of fables and national identity, where bridges are built by devils and nature displays its primordial power. It is a place that links north and south and crosses frontiers; a symbol of modernity, technical progress and engineering brilliance. Yet here too we see the limits of progress: huge traffic jams and the changes wrought by human beings on the Alpine environment. The mountain range that is the Gotthard massif is a place of ambivalence, where nature and technology, ecology and economics, openness and the fortress mentality, past and future meet.

The faster we advance, the greater the distance we cover and the smaller the world becomes. Mobility opens up new spaces, leads to prosperity, progress and freedom. It condenses and connects. Mobility builds and occupies, and consumes resources. This ambivalence, these utopias and disenchantments, are part of the history of the Gotthard. Here, mobility comes up against its limits.'
www.sasso-sangottardo.ch

In a 7 channel video installation the physical and, inasmuch experienceable through the gestural, the psychic movements of 8 protagonists are systematically explored during their work and contrasted with each other. In the installation a rhythmic and interrupted apparatus of work develops which is influenced by repetitions and routines but also moments of decision making, success and failures.

«In the ‘work room’ all lies, that associate work exclusively with drudgery or only see work as means to an end, are shown up as being untrue. One video work is projected on to six wall surfaces showing, from different perspectives, what the exhibitors understand a structure of work to be: the course of action followed by eight people in their occupations. By showing the daily routines of a cashier, surgeon, gardener, manager and various other people it illustrates successfully what it aims to demonstrate, namely that every job in its own unique way has its moments of achievement and intensity and at times can become an end in itself.»
Neue Zürcher Zeitung 1.2.2010

Inside and outside, proximity and distance:
Incompatible but inseparable.

The open space in architecure unfolded to a horizon.

An entire Vogue magazine is literally erased page by page within 21 hours. Every surface point is touched, every moment conjures up new images and associations just before these then disappear into the ‘point zero’ of a closed, black glossy surface.

How to present a place that lives mostly from and in imagination?

Fragments from photo and film archives of refugees in the 1920s blend into an oscillating cloud of memories which glides through a hallway of 24 meters.

The picture had bestowed something permanent on the memory that was also somewhat worn out through time.
Now that the image is being burned, now that it cannot be, can never again be looked at, something momentary, something contemporary breaks into this persistence of the visually captured memory - but is also its definite end.

A collage of still images and films shows not only the history and function of the buildings that once stood on this site, it also highlights the important events that took place here.
It proves that the site served as a prestigious, symbolically charged and often controversial centre of power for centuries.

Princes and politicians tore down, converted and rebuilt structures in order to express their political ambitions and visions.

The design of the exhibition room too, with its raw concrete walls, alludes to the fact that the site has always been a work in progress in the service of power.

Fairy tale princesses out of the entire history of film run from level to level as if in a video game. Each level hides a new challenge: a villain, a riddle, a commitment or a simple cliche that runs deep in our own cultural heritage.

The filmic installation analysis Pasolinis films in a landscape of 12 free floating big projections.

«The video installation ‘Pasolini and Death’ by Dominique Müller and Detlef Weitz is a true gem and a piece of art in its own right but still manages to do justice to Pasolini’s filmic oeuvre. On twelve equally sized projection surfaces, conceived as a horizontal filmstrip, an analysis of his cinematic vocabulary unfolds.»
Neue Zürcher Zeitung 19.3.09

«For the observer who could experience Pasolini’s films as contemporary events, the main point of interest remains to be Pasolini’s films themselves. For this purpose, a circular panorama consisting of twelve projections was conceived as the central feature of this exhibition, in which the artistic and thematic emphases of the films are shown. This spectacle conjures up the desire to re-watch some of his films.»
Neue Zürcher Zeitung 23.12.05

A series of short films on the World Heritage Sites in Switzerland commissioned by the Swiss Commission for UNESCO.

On the occasion of the signing of the Swiss Charta of the World Heritage Sites in Switzerland, Mira Film has produced a series of 45 short films. By means of information modules as well as portraits about objects and people, all 11 World Heritage Sites in Switzerland are presented. Within a consistent concept, the series joins the cinematographic language of the directors Fabian Wegmüller, Niccolò Castelli, Renata Grünenfelder, Samuel Chalard, Vadim Jendreyko and students of the Haute école d’art et de design / HEAD Geneva.

Fabian Wegmüller directed the shorts for the following World Heritage Sites: Abbey of St Gall, Benedictine Convent of St John at Müstair, Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch, Rhaetian Railway in the Albula / Bernina Landscapes, Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona

A circle of androids (robots intended to be human) discussing the pain of not knowing emotions, of being infallible, and therefore replaceable, and their desire for mortality.