Coutts made Reminiscences of Memory during a six-month International Fellowship at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral at Bad Ems, Germany. Famous for its healing waters, Bad Ems was frequented by Caspar David Friedrich and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and was a magnet for artists and musicians seeking cures. With her accumulative, layered method to writing and filmic narrative, Coutts explored the visualisation of memory through film, drawing upon literary texts and artworks from the time of the town’s heyday to the present.
The film re-maps and overlays fragments of re-appropriated works that examine the mechanisms of memory and decay. Focusing on the historical relationship between the environment and mental health at this location, Coutts produced a work wherein the visual is overlaid with a text – as with subtitles – telling the story of a woman’s uncertain memory of a man losing his mind. Reminiszenzen der Erinnerung contains re-fashioned excerpts from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), re-enactments of scenes from Hollis Frampton’s film (nostalgia) (1971) and Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), the latter filmed twice to involve non-professional actors and musicians sited in Germany and the UK.
Reminiszenzen der Erinnerung was first shown at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral (2010) as part of a group show of the eight selected Fellows and was featured and reviewed on the German TV channel Mittelrhein (2010). It was screened in the group show ‘Doris’ at StedeFreund, Berlin (2010), and included in Coutts’s solo exhibition, ‘Millions Like Us’ at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London (2011). The work was selected for the Salon Video Prize at Matt Roberts, London (2011).
Accompanying the show at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Coutts’s bookwork Thought Sequence (Argo Books, Berlin, 2011) introduced an additional narrative layer to her research, retelling Walter Benjamin’s story ‘The handkerchief’ (1932).