Peacock Hole

The cinema as cave allegory: celebrated in the grotto that provides the setting for Peacock Hole is the misalliance of light and shadow. Lithic landscapes trembling below the water´s surface, shimmering in the artificial light in impeccable white, corpse green, and scarlet, are the spaces of action for the amorphous creatures to do their thing. Mutated bodies and surgically expanded faces appear and disappear again behind vertical sliding screens; the living dead stare into the netherworld with black eyes.
The artist Katrina Daschner designs disturbingly stunning parallel universes, fascinating meta-worlds in which old conventions of reality and laws of nature, the dreary rules of "reason" and "normality" appear suspended. Sabine Marte´s sound design emphasizes a development of fear and terror without detour, while Hannes Böck´s camera work reveals a great sensibility to the elegance of the abysmal. The cinematic space is a great illusion but the sensuality within it is very real: white and red colors that stand for innocence, and for (acutely threatened) life run silently across the screen, block the view of the imaginary behind, but at the same time, share a view of something more fundamental — the second level of cinema, the ambiguity of the emotional horror painting. Based loosely on Schnitzler´s "Dream Story", Peacock Hole is arranged as a march of zombies, as an underground catwalk for the gothic beauties of Orcus. (Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt