My tacit atmosphere, my inner synesthetic cosmos,

is the tickling of tongue, the staccato between my teeth,

the weighing of the words,

the rhythm of the syllables,

the movement of the words,

their time,

their rhythm again, again and again,

the amount of saliva that gives them a specific, indescribable savour

and I follow,

I follow the curves of each single letter with my eyes

- over and over again -

as each pattern of their surface is simply innate to them - only.

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My research investigates tacit atmospheres that we carry within us.

In short, the space that we can perceive but can not express verbally.

Focusing especially on:

Limit of lingual expression. Verbal gaps. Muteness. Synesthetic phenomena and their stimuli.

Internal perceptions while reading poetry.

I build structural analogies to translate them visually into an editing of a film. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Long story, short:

When I was in my early 20s, I discovered a volume of poems. They stood binded into a book on a shelf in the library of the Jewish Museum in Munich.

More than 50 poems were in there, written by a teenager from the Bukovina region in the 1930s and 40s for a boy, Lejser, whom she secretly cherished.

Her name was Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, born 1924 in Chernivtsi (Bukovina), perished in 1942 - aged only 18 - in the Shoah.

She was a 2nd degree cousin of Paul Celan. Selma is so relatable for many girls, her unrequited love and her teenage dreams. I started to research and was finally able to meet a schoolfriend of hers. She told me Selma's story. A journey through Israel and Ukraine was about to begin from which I came back with a lot of filmed material.

So, now, the edit then... .

As I already mentioned, my research at the RCA focuses on the relationship between language, especially phonetic and graphemic-colour perceptiveness of understanding poetry, and language-gaps, muteness.

Generally, my research asks questions about possible visual transformations of words into filmic language but also of possible transformations of tacit spheres that we perceive within us (for example the phenomenon of synesthesia).

On this basis, I approached the filmed material about Selma's story which I had brought back from my journey.

I tried to investigate how a visual transformation of Selma's poetry during the film edit could be possible.

Structurally, I based it on a principle that was simulated through grapheme-colour synesthesia while reading Selma's poems and what appeared to me as a "tacit" gap during this experience.

With those phenomena as a fundament, I build structural analogies between language and film editing as a form of visual narrative.
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During the research, it became apparent that the layer of writing was also not to be neglected as many of my reflections developed through a combination of auto-ethnographic writing and editing the film.

So a self-reflective, literary text came into being together with the film. A short excerpt of the writing can be found in the very first section on this page.
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What you see on the right are film stills from the project that reflect the structural approach of the research. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________