“déjà- vu”, Director: Lisl Ponger, 1999, 23 min. (color)
In a subtropical country, white visitors crowd into a place where dark-skinned farm workers are pouring out their harvest baskets. They look curiously, as if they want to check the tea leaves. They pull out their cameras everywhere, whether in front of large wild animals or camels on horseback, in front of decorated human bodies or everyday work processes. Sometimes they themselves look into the camera, for later, for home, when they would proudly show off their ‘exotic’ finds. This pose reflects a centuries-old model of Western travel and depiction – the tourist in search of the foreign. Lisl Ponger reassembles found amateur film footage of Western vacationers, traces their fascinated view of the foreign and thus archives a collection of exotic otherness. To this she adds a series of voices that speak in many languages at a subtle distance from the image and tell of experiences with different forms of colonization: as the dominated in their own country or as displaced and made strangers.
Lisl Ponger, “déjà vu”, 1999