LONELINESS Masha Godovannaya, Tomorrow I failed completely, 2020

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Masha Godovannaya was planning to travel to the US on March 16th, 2020. It was a very anticipated month-long trip. But instead, the world went into shutdown, and she stayed in her flat. At first, the idea of closing borders was terrifying for Godovannaya: ‘Being of Soviet heritage, shutting borders remain a long-lasting fear. Suddenly, this also became a reality in Austria and in the rest of Europe’.
Instinctively, Godovannaya’s response to lockdown was to make her camera a companion of her solitude. Godovannaya’s practice often includes this feminist gesture: filming events of her life. However, the sequences aren’t always a direct expression of the events – they are rather an articulation of feelings and emotions, a sort of mechanism that allows the artist to process her experiences. Creating a visual archive of her life, Godovannaya lets go of the control over the camera’s gaze and allows the images form their own narrative – she is interested in what these images tell her, as well as in the process of interpreting them.
Just like a diary, ‘Tomorrow I failed completely’ is a document of the first months of lockdown. The hybrid video work invites us into the artist’s private solitude. At the centre of the work is Godovannaya’s window, her only antidote to her lockdown isolation. We contemplate rain and wind, children playing on a square, people carrying their shopping. Time flies, the weather is getting warmer. Yet the loneliness of being indoors, corresponds to the loneliness outside the window: the square is mostly empty, quiet. Yet the view out of the window isn’t a sign of melancholy. In our recent conversation, Godovannaya explained that she relates the view out of the window to the experience of motherhood, the theme that was at the centre of her previous work Hunger (2011). Being entrapped in privacy, mothers often spend a lot of time at home, especially when children get sick. Godovannaya emphasises that this is not a judgement, rather it is a reality of life that needs to be faced. But then: ‘How do you refuse domesticity to kill or alter your subjectivity? You need to find beauty in it’.

The experience of being alone for long periods of time creates a deprivation of touch. ‘If no-one touches you, you lose the borders of yourself’, explains the artists. In her isolation, her cameras, both the digital one and the 16 mm Krasnogorsk-3, became her kinfolks: ‘It was like a sisterhood. Working with the cameras is an intimate process: they all have bodies after all. These non-human entities are always with me.’

Defining herself as an experimental filmmaker, Godovannaya works in dialogue with her material, using a combination digitally and 16mm film recordings. This intermediality is embedded in the narrative of ‘Tomorrow I failed completely’ – the cameras aren’t simply a tool; they are also performers. In other words, they are not just observing, but also being observed. ‘Tomorrow I failed completely’ presents the viewer with multiple gazes, it dislocates cinematic conventions, whilst also questioning the medium itself. The viewer sees Godovannaya on screen, walking around the room, or sitting at a desk filming the window. These short sequences open up the cinematographic space to multiplicity and three-dimensionality – as viewers, we form an understanding between the gaze displayed on screen and the physical location of its point of view. Yet, in the final seconds of the work Godovannaya lets go of her role as a filmmaker – she leaves the trigger, abandons the cameras to their own devices, questioning her power to control the image.

Polina Chizhova