The permanent site-specific installation cinéma that was developed especially for the Kunstraum Buchberg by DORIT MARGREITER establishes a cinema room for Buchberg Castle on the river Kamp. Comprising a mobile made up of the letters of the word ‘cinéma’, a concrete pedestal and a projection screen turned 90°, a space is defined that presents itself as an installation, as functional and sculptural.

‘Invited to develop a piece for the collection of site-specific artistic interventions and installations built up by Gertraud and Dieter Bogner since the 1980s, DORIT MARGREITER decided to use the conditions of the site, the interleaving of architectural structure and artistic works, as the starting point for a film. In parallel, she defined a place in the attic as another aspect of the work, which, continuing the internal logic of the environment, serves as a cinema for other people’s films. […] The attic selected by MARGREITER [constitutes] a surface that at first is not clearly limited and difficult to read; it derives its form from the diverse spatial relationships between beams, floor, projection screen, pedestal, chimney and storage space instead of the rectangular floor plan. The space-consuming mobile cinéma (2014) hangs in this setting of spaces in between, like the opening credits for the cinema that also functions as a marking and, taking up the interplay of the omitted surfaces, is reduced to its basic components: light source (projector) and reflector (white wall).

‘Cinéma eludes being read in the classic sense. The free-floating object cannot be captured by a single glance, it demands the inclusion of what is omitted by the framing, completion, the relaxation of our viewing habits and incorporation of the idea of only temporarily or partially permanent architectures in the experience. Positioned in the middle of the room and, unlike the sculptures by Alexander Calder or even Moholy-Nagy, hung more deeply in correlation with the floor, as an artwork the mobile may stand right in the way of the viewers – just as the projection screen on the opposite side confronts the film image – but it also creates a different permeability and relationship structure between surrounding space, picture space and viewer space due to its multiple parts. The questions of space addressed in MARGREITER’s artistic practice – the relationship between constructed, projected and model space – are always, as is epitomized in cinéma, infused with text in two respects: both springing from an underlying interest in graphics, design and typography and deeply rooted in a discursive understanding of display, which incorporates the spatial arrangement. In this respect, an approach to the architecture takes effect that interprets spaces as “written” structures similar to notations.’

(Excerpts from a text by Rike Frank in Dorit Margreiter. cinéma, mumok, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Vienna/Cologne, 2019)

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