Inspired by the children’s book About Two Squares by El Lisstzky, the film Transient Witness simultaneously merges and obscures the intimate and the public through a fictional story where the actions of collecting and stealing function as synonyms and the concepts of inheritance and loss become interchangeable.
It unfolds a complex fictional story, navigating between historical facts about the Baroque and the avant-garde; art and its politics. It is an imagined plot about the transfer of the objects from the private house of avant-garde collector Egidio Marzona in Berlin to their new domicile – the Japanisches Palais, a Rococo building that belongs to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD). The transfer actually occurred when Egidio Marzona donated his vast collection to the SKD in 2016, where it is now known as the Archiv der Avantgarden (AdA).
