Christel Liebenberg, Fragments of Familiarity I (2024).

Fragments of Familiarity (2022-2024)

Artist Statement

My practice explores the interplay between home, memory, and technology, drawing on expanded cinema and experimental animation to examine how these concepts are constructed in the digital era. I investigate the relationship between physical and virtual spaces and how they challenge traditional understandings of home and memory.

Materiality plays a central role in my work, both in its tactile engagement with analogue film and its exploration of digital media’s capacity to evoke memory. Audience participation is key to my practice, influenced by expanded cinema’s rejection of passive spectatorship. Through augmented reality, virtual reality, and spatial augmentation, I invite viewers to engage in hybrid spaces that reflect the fragmented, surreal nature of memory.

This engagement highlights how home is as much a physical place as an imagined space and constructed through the interplay of personal and cultural histories, material remnants, and digital reinterpretations.

Fragments of Familiarity (2022-2024) explores the concepts of home and memory, not as fixed or singular concepts, but as fluid, multifaceted experiences shaped by the interplay between the real and the virtual. Rather than simply representing memory, the artworks aim to create spaces of interactivity, where viewers can actively participate in constructing meaning based on their own memories and emotional responses.

Exhibition

Catalogue

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