Not Being Able to Swim in Shipwreck

On Saturday after the market at 12.30 pm, the focus will be on ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ by Théodore Géricault (1819), probably the most famous painting in the Louvre alongside the Mona Lisa.

The Louvre in Paris is a repository of history and a place of remembrance, which is where the video ‘Not being able to swim in a shipwreck’ takes us: In it, three African men of different ages visit the world-famous museum. They take a seat in front of a monumental painting and look at it in silence. Théodore Géricault’s painting tells the story of a human catastrophe on the high seas when the French frigate ‘Medusa’ ran aground off the coast of Mauritania in July 1816. France had just regained its colony of Senegal. As there were not enough dinghies for everyone, the crew used the masts to build a life raft for 149 people. But the connecting rope was cut. For 13 days, the castaways drifted helplessly at sea, were swept into the water and massacred each other. Only 15 survived. The news sparked a scandal in France and Géricault’s unsparing image shocked his audience.

Odenbach’s video sequences in the Louvre – accompanied by a balafon soundtrack by musician Ricky Ojijo – are interspersed with shots of the surf off the coast of Ghana with superimposed texts. These are based on interviews that Odenbach conducted with the three Africans about their flight across the sea, their lives and their feelings of being foreigners. However, the title of the video already clearly indicates that even in the current refugee crisis, many do not survive such a crossing across the Mediterranean

Marcel Odenbach (born 1953 in Cologne) lives in Berlin and Cape Coast, Ghana, and works in Berlin and Cologne. He studied architecture, art history and semiotics at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany, between 1974 and 1979. He has taught media art at various institutions in Germany, including the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne and the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf.

Odenbach’s videotapes and installations have been exhibited at festivals and institutions worldwide and bear witness to his decisive role in promoting and shaping the international development of this genre. From the early videos, which were still conceived for presentation on monitors, to his complex installations with large-scale projections, the screening demonstrates the subtlety and formal diversity with which Odenbach stages the moving image and its acoustic accompaniment.

Odenbach is considered one of the most important German video artists.

Admission is free.