History of a Cake / Povijest kolača / L'histoire d'un gateau / Die Geschichte eines Kuchens

Kristina Leko, 1999
20'57'' beta SP/DV
Single channel video (edition 3 + 2)
Croatian, French, German, English
Sound editing: Ivan Marušić Klif
Camera: Svebor Kranjc
Video editing: Igor Kožić

The video was created as a part of a duration intervention in urban space commission by Media-Scape 7 exhibition curated by Heiko Daxl and Ingeborg Füllep within the Zagreb Music Biennale 1999.



Experimental, sound-based video work with reduced image, "History of a Cake" is an unhappy love story confessed in the first person singular in four languages, Croatian, French, German and English. During these four narrative parts, the image is reduced while the artist's voice is presented with two audio channels and a sound-space panorama. The mostly black screen occasionally presents moving images, found footage documentary material that, according to the artist, features the three most beautiful images of the Second World War. Leko made her selection after watching more than 30 documentaries on the Second World War. The first footage shows a camel in North Africa in 1942, the second gives a glimpse of the first meeting of the Allies in Tehran in 1943, and finally the third sequence shows women throwing flowers at tanks during the liberation of Paris in 1944. In between the narrative parts, we see images shot in a run-down cake shop in Zagreb at the present moment in 1999, documenting a manufacturing process.





Context / Note on the original setting: In its original setting, this video work was part of an intervention in urban space and a multimedia environment that included the production and sale of a specially designed cake. It was a special cake that had the power to happily end any unhappy story. Based on an original recipe, it was handmade and sold for several months in a pastry shop in the center of Zagreb. The video was exhibited in the same shop together with an audio installation. More about the intervention can be found under public space projects.

 

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