Our apartment was one hundred years old, and it was haunted. Friends suggested that we paint a black spot on the ceiling to get rid of the ghost. She wasn't a bad ghost, she was just an old hooker. She kept turning the front hall light on and off, and opening doors for her johns, who came at all hours of the night. She loved sex and she loved parties, so we were forced to have sex and parties all the time to appease her. Other ghosts were also there: immigrants who spoke neither English nor French. They had come from far away, and longed to return to their homelands. Sometimes they sang sad songs. Shimmer started as their story. My grandmother's story, my parents' story and mine got mixed up with their's along the way.
Nelson Henricks
Credits
Technical information
Documentation
"Shimmer (1995), also by Nelson Henricks, brings together images from diverse sources : landscapes, objects, people. The soundtrack, dominated by a voice-over commentary by the artist, overlaps stories and snatches of autobiography. Hendricks takes up light and dark, a ghost story, his memories of his grandmother, a haunted apartment. The images run in parallel with the commentary. Here is where the doubling up occurs, in the false matching born of the simultaneity of the two flows. There arises a disquieting sensation, a fascination, which reveals that telling a story and observing are always matters of invisibility. In these experiments, there is always something which will escape our eyes or our ears. In Henricks’ work, the image, reality and identity have a spectral destiny and mirror each other: they ‘shimmer’. Nelson Henricks is a video maker who refuses to show all, to tell all. He prefers ellipsis and suggests that images are born of the movement between the visible and the invisible that the text on the images produces".
Gingras, Nicole. «Faire rouler les mots dans sa bouche», Espaces intérieurs: le corps, la langue, les mots, la peau (Québec City, Musée du Québec, 1999), p. 128.
