Against a background of disturbing, oneiric images like something out of a science fiction film, a female voice-over gives a first-person account of a confused and emotionally destructive affair with a man who pretended for years to be a doctor and married. The narration begins in hospital after the man, on the point of being unmasked, tried to crash the car and kill both of them. We feel deeply involved in the dramatic relationship between the leading characters, who start off in a sort of suspended state when the story is being told but ultimately lose all belief in their love and come to grief. The striking point is the insistence on deceit, a typical feature of human emotional processes. The woman realized almost immediately that the man was lying but chose to be deceived, yielding to illusion in the name of love. In the same way, those watching and listening to the video fall into an emotive and visual snare, caught up in a mechanism where it is strong emotional involvement that generates the truth (of the story) and the reality (of the images).
In this as in previous works, Saskia Olde Wolbers draws inspiration from items in the press, TV broadcasts and anonymous stories. Her interest focuses invariably on tragic figures who lose their mental bearings and experience a crisis of identity such as to endanger their very existence. Wolbers uses events that actually happened to develop stories that shimmer and sway between dream and reality.
While her splendid and disturbing images seem to have been digitally created and manipulated, the fantastic architectural structures and objects making up the sets are instead the result of analogical and manual procedures. The elements are in fact made by the artist in her studio through a process of meticulous, high-precision work on discarded and recycled materials that can take years. The results are models in miniature that serve as sets for future videos in which the artist always succeeds in translating emotional and mental states of a disturbing nature into ambiguous and almost biomorphic images.

Saskia Olde Wolbers (The Netherlands, 1971)

The video Placebo by Saskia Olde Wolbers opens in a white room of a liquid and surrealistic character. As camera drifts slowly over the surface of the walls, which seem to detach and dissolve in an unreal, dream-like atmosphere, a stretcher covered with a white sheet and other elements recalling a hospital environment come into view.