Wishful thinking is a 2-channel video installation that uses the visual language of Western movies. It plays with its ideal of a free and lawless life full of adventure in the seemingly endless wilderness of the prairie. Two billboards show projections whose moving images shift in their dimensions and get iconographically exaggerated: On the larger one, we see a pair of cowboy boots on the smaller counterpart shadowy steppe landscape shimmering with heat passes by. At some point, the boots begin to smoke, as if impatiently anticipating a duel that will never take place. Instead, the loop seamlessly starts anew: the landscape passes persistently and steadily, the smoke over the boots comes and goes. Judging by the sounds, now and then a train passes by in the distance. Crickets chirp.
This work was created in collaboration with the artist Gabi Blum.