Kindergarten Antonio Sant' Elia, 1932,

In this video, a group of uniformly dressed children are shown between two young trees, which have presumably only just been planted. The sun seems to be low, for long shadows are cast on the meticulously manicured lawn and the neatly aligned paving stones. However, the children don’t move – the only sound is the gentle rustling of the treetops. This video work was based on a black-and-white photograph from the 1930s. The photo was taken when the new Antonio SantʼElia kindergarten was opened in the Italian town of Como. It shows a nursery built by the architect Giuseppe Terragni according to the ideals of Fascist Rationalism. The severity of its design is deliberately interrupted by the artist David Claerbout, for example by the addition of animated leaves to the bare trees in the original image which stir slightly in the video. It seems as if the atmosphere of time standing still so typical of photographs has been unfrozen and set in motion. Even so, the children remain motionless in the midst of play. The artistic result is a kind of visual puzzle that preserves the static nature of photography, yet doesn’t develop entirely into a narrative video. Instead, it’s an intermediate image in which the temporal levels of past, present, and future condense into a scenario that’s both calm and unsettling.