Fog Walking (2007)

Single channel PAL video, 7’58”. Soundtrack: Igor Stravinsky – The Firebird Suite. London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado.

‘There is no Road…’ also effected, perhaps despite itself, a separate critique of Romanticism: one of simply eroding and effacing its charm through repetition. All paths, all paths, are superficially similar – a convention in Aranberri’s work aimed to examine. Ergin Cavusoglu’s lush painterly video Fog Walking (2007), meanwhile, best encapsulated the frustration involved in this monotony. It was made when Cavusoglu was in Biarritz during ten straight days of fog and is set to The Firebird Suite (1910) by Igor Stravinsky, who worked in the area between 1922 and 1924. The symphony crescendos with the image of a sunrise, which is set in the first third iof the film, thus creating a peak that ultimately signifies nothing: a morning but with no change in the foggy landscape or the rhythm of the editing. The video addressed Romanticism by running it into the ground – letting it tire itself out on its own loop of rehearsal, steadily losing climatic and symbolic potential in an ever-growing build-up of constraint and claustrophobia.
Melissa Gronlund, Frieze (April 2009)