Foodfilms (2010)

This camera-less film was created in a darkroom from photograms of the ingredients of four dishes: alphabet pasta soup, goulash, the Austrian dessert Kaiserschmarrn, and coffee. The ingredients were placed directly on the film strip, exposed, and then developed by hand. The result is an abstraction of the cooking process itself – a series of images-touches of ingredients, arranged in the order in which they were mixed. “We no longer notice what is extraordinary in daily life. The artist Viktoria Schmid, however, takes this as her material. Schmid manages to draw out the fascinating potential in the interweaving of light and time. She makes traces of light visible, and turns them into the central focus of how she deals with time and space. While we generally only pay secondary attention to the play of shadow and light, she manages to draw attention back to these phenomena, and she does so with impressive reduction.” — Siegfried A. Fruhauf