Alienation – and trying to find a position in the world– is an important theme in Vita Soul Wilmering’s practice. The work Spiegl is told from the perspective of its protagonist Yitschak Spiegl, a Jewish man who fled communist Czechoslovakia in 1988. In the 54-minute film that combines documentary style with staged moments and musical narration, you see Wilmering and Spiegl visit places in Eastern Europe where he resided as a refugee. Chance encounters on the street give you a sense of the social climate and conventional thinking that have been the painful undertones of his life story. Wilmering explores what she refers to as the ‘performative space provoked by the presence of the camera’, as a way to communicate intimately with the people she films. A close intergenerational friendship develops between artist and protagonist as you see them travel together, or decide how to play the next scene. Fiction touches on the hyper-real here. The film integrates the making of the work into the work itself and provides a piercing image of history, grief and the desire for connection and refuge.

Vita Soul Wilmering (1996) lives and works in The Hague, where she is part of the artist collective Helicopter. Wilmering studied Audiovisual Arts and took courses at the conservatory and drama department at KASK in Ghent. Starting her projects from a basis in documentary film, Wilmering works with video, installation art, performance and music. She considers the performative space which a camera evokes an instrument to start friendships and to communicate on an intimate level with the people she works with. Her films have been selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Visions du Reél (CH) and DocLisboa (PT). She was artist in residence at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and KAMEN Artist Residency in Bosnia and Herzegovina.