Renée's Dream (29 Palms, CA) - 2005,

32 pieces,
Edition 3/5,
31 x 38 cm each, installed 276 x 164 cm including gaps.
32 analog C-Prints, hand printed by the artist,
based on 27 original Polaroids.
Artist inventory 8072.03.
Signature Label and certificate.
Not mounted.

29 palms, ca
first viewing 01 / 08

29 Palms, CA is a project positioned between film and art. In this project the German photo artist, Stefanie Schneider, explores and documents the dreams and fantasies of a group of people living in a trailer park community in the California desert.

The project was on view at the Berlinale / Forum in the Atrium of the Gossip Bar (Filmhaus Potsdamer Platz) and at Gallery Spesshardt & Klein.

For the first time the complexity of this grand art project, is positioned between film and fine arts, as well as a link or interface in between various media, will be exhibited. An essential part of this project is the artistic, conceptual and filmic collaboration between actors, musicians, photo artists, directors etc. - Udo Kier is not only a performer, but also a producer. Radha Mitchell is writing part of the script. Sophie Huber, Max Sharam, Daisy McCrackin, JD Rudometkin, Zoe Bicat and Camille Waldorf are writing the music, developing their characters and act as performers. All participants are developing and acting out their characters. Steve Marshall is a performer as well as the DJ of the “Lonely Hearts Radio Show”.
The vision of a feature-length film is just as important in this as all the single, small stages or fragments, which are necessary for this film: Just as life and the circumstances of our social reality, the project 29 Palms, CA is in a state of constant change and development. The film is a biography and a social commentary, whose characters act as the alter egos of those individuals who portray them. In the course of the art project the different performers have contributed ideas, stories, scenes, monologues, poems, music and films, so that the basic principle of the concept, namely a collaboration of different perspectives
and the pooling of different fragments and depictions, bestows a lively rhythm upon the film. Each character will introduce his or her character in the form of a fictional or semi-fictional diary on the website, which was specially developed for this project. The website hereby plays the role of an independent world from which the film project and the radio show emerge. The characters take influence on what will be seen in the film through their descriptions. Through the radio show connections
between the individual performers will be established. The whole film is generated from Polaroid pictures, which Stefanie Schneider edita into films. The fact that the films are expired leads to the surreal distortions and colorings. The pictures appear fleeting and taut, blurry. Stefanie Schneider paints with her Polaroid films. She clearly alludes to the ambivalence between imagination and portrayal, between fiction and reality, and leaves it to the viewer to form his/her own picture, to remain in a surreal or real space. The motive of the desert also supports the dichotomy between imagination and reality, at any moment breaking the clearness of a definite ascription, which is definitely not found in her work. All the more clear it becomes that the characters are living in their own lost world, but that life itself can change their perspective on their world. The place in which the performers of 29 Palms, CA are living, is more an
idea or a reflection of a place than a place per definition itself. The light and the desert landscape are painting an imaginary reality, which the characters find themselves exposed to. Memories, fantasies and reality merge.