Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler

Single Wide, 2002

The video Single Wide by Teresa Hubbard (b. 1965) and Alexander Birchler (b. 1962) focusses on a young woman at a turning point in her life. In emotional turmoil she leaves a typically American home and clambers into a pickup truck whose engine is already idling. Whether she really drives off, as the sound of a departing vehicle gives us to understand, remains unclear, because in the ensuing scene she is once again to be seen in her car in the same position. This time, instead of driving off, she accelerates hard and breaks through the wall of the house with the front of her car. Frightened by her sudden impulsiveness, she climbs out of the car and goes back into the house. The camera follows her in a loop of this never-ending story through the tidy rooms of the house in which she remains a prisoner, even after breaking out of it. In their videos, these two artists use narrative elements in a similar way to movies; however, they simultaneously deconstruct the latter by rendering their plots ineffective. Time and space no longer serve to structure the context of the plots, but instead reflect the inner life of their protagonists.

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