At the Still Point, by Heike Baranowsky. Published by Distanza Verlag. Heike Baranowsky in conversation with Chiara Capodici. In collaboration with German Academy Rome Villa Massimo

What does it mean to experience time? How do images generate reality? Where in the visible does the invisible reside? Heike Baranowsky’s works explore light phenomena, motion sequences, spatial constellations, and architectonic structures. Her videos, sculptures, cyanotypes, and photographic series are based on painstaking observation, conceptual elegance, and probing reflections on time, space, and perception.

At the Still Point documents Baranowsky’s oeuvre, gathering central sets of works and methodological approaches from the past ten years. With essays by Kerstin Starkemeier and Maj Smozna.

Among the works presented in the book, Soliloquio (2022-2025), a text and a film developed after Baranowsky’s intensive study of the meridian in the Roman church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri.

The video shows the sun patch, more precisely the image of the sun moving across the marble floor and the furnishings of the church, over an entire year on important astronomical dates. Filmed by Volker Gläser and Heike Baranowsky in stop-motion technique, we see in parallel the winter / summer solstice, autumn and spring equinoxes and other astronomical annual events.

The voice-over, developed by Ursula Rogg as a libretto, combines architectural, astronomical and (religious) historical aspects of Soliloquio with observations of the first-person narrator from the years 2020—2021. An Italian voice rhythmizes the text by enumerating all the dates on which the filmmaker was present in the church during those years, similar to a rosary praying.

Heike Baranowsky was in residence at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo in 2020/21.