In Japanese celebration, dance and death have long been connected. Rebekka Deubner's photographs, taken during the festival of Obon, capture glimpses of this Buddhist celebration honoring the spirits of the ancestors and their presence among the living. These images of fireworks, body parts, masks, and textiles unveil 'Odori', the dance of Bon. At the heart of these five-hundred year old traditional celebrations, the costumes, music, and gestures are collected into an exhilarating trance that lends shape to the spirits of the deceased. With 'Odori', Rebekka Deubner composes picture loops that operate akin to amulets that wish to seek other inner worlds; highlighting the mystical, to escape reason and underline life's boundedness.
Squid milk is a collection of fragments of Rebekka's Japanese exodus edited in resonance and recurrence of forms, characters, and motifs, drawn from the daily life that Rebekka invents for herself, as well as from musical, cinematographic, and photographic references. The edition constructs the sequencing of a silent film for which Livio Mosca composed the soundtrack.
The soundtrack can be accessed here: https://enfancemusic.bandcamp.com/album/loreille-nacr-e
Rebekka Deubner’s work is full of narratives of metamorphosis, as close as possible to the earth and the bodies it carries. ‘Strip’ is a work featuring photograms and videos in which the artist attempts to become one with her late mother. Dressing her clothes and underwear, like counter-forms that still carry within them the latent trace of the body and epidermis that inhabited them, slipping into them and, in video performances, tying them up, patching them up and covering herself in them. Alongside these short films, Rebekka Deubner combines a collection of photograms of clothing, also fragmented, which, reassembled on the wall, sketch out the contours of a vast, warm body.
