Ricarda Denzer engages with the aspects of film and architecture to explore notions of power and the forms it takes within the public and private spheres. Her work revolves around language, particularly the spoken word, which often serves as the focus of her investigations into the relationships between author and subject. Sound is an integral component to verbal communication, and Denzer examines the tonal shifts, pauses, and utterances that often go unnoticed during the simple act of speaking. For Denzer, language, like paint or clay, is an artistic material that can be manipulated into different forms whose intrinsic narrative value is by its very nature encoded with multiple meanings.

How are stories created, and how can these dialogues be fixed in the moment of their creation? These questions are the starting points for Denzer’s audio-visual productions. The emptiness of a place may trigger a reading of the absent that gradually mutates into a production of meaning. By drawing attention to secondary scenes that appear banal to everyday eyes, Denzer transforms these anonymous spaces into sites imbued with the potential for new narratives. Removing all barriers for distraction, we focus our gaze on the non-visible.

La croûte du chou - Das Saure vom Kraut (2007) is a multipart audio-visual piece based on a conversation with Namrata Bali, treasurer of the Self Employed Women’s Association. The core issues of SEWA are to define what it means to be a woman and to be a working woman, to organize the unorganized, and to have one voice. Beginning with this interview, in an associative, non-linear narrative form, Denzer deals with existential domains of labor, of being, and acting. What does it mean to earn money, to work in order to organize oneself, or to lose track? How do the act of speaking and the system of language work as an instrument for not accepting the world as it is? How can protest, private language, and being visible in public be applied as practices of resistance which are not wage and profit-oriented?

Through these processes of participation, Denzer engages the viewer in dialogues about history, migration, and cultural identity in subtle ways. Projection, intuition, fiction, and fact overlap one another in the monologues delivered by the viewers who through the act of speaking increasingly become readers and authors of themselves and their own frames of life.

- Barbara Holub