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CHILDHOOD KINGDOM
2023
4K video | 2.39:1 | 34.00 min. | b/w | sound


Childhood Kingdom tells of the childhood memories and experiences of the artist Kay Walkowiak in the modernist house designed and built by his architect grandfather in the 1950s through weaving together the photographs left in his grandfather’s estate to make a short animated film. With slow camera pans, the film’s poetry conveys the specific modernist qualities of the visionary structure and the various atmospheres of the rooms. The camera perspectives here are cool and distanced, reflecting the house’s significantly reduced and minimalist building style, which was inspired by architectural icons like Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe. Countless art objects and Asian antiques, carpets, and plants—as well as carefully selected, stylish designer furniture—also lent the house’s interior a special character. Close-up views serve to convey the child’s perspective, from which the house possessed a deeply mesmerizing effect and often something of an eerie quality as well. With its remarkable interior, the house was his “Childhood Kingdom,” a special place of discovery and learning, but also of quiet refuge, outside the everyday sense of time, in which particularly the present seemed to stand still, unchanging. Above all, however, the house’s interior spaces blended together with the innerworlds of his childhood: when he explored the house, it acted as a projection surface for his unconscious desires, fears, and dreams. The film subtly weaves together narratives of the tragic story of his grandparents with a reflection on the artist’s formative aesthetic sensibilities and experiences in his family’s house. Simultaneously with the continuously flowing movement of the child’s gaze through the house, the narrative of a family history over three generations increasingly unfolds as well. As a homage to the house, which in its time met with more condemnation than appreciation and has since been torn down, Childhood Kingdom is thus also an exploration of the artist’s own life and personal development.



Written / Directed / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Voice Over: Georg Pöchhacker
Photographies: Christine & Koloman Lenk
Production Assistant: Barbara Probst
Script Advisor: Jacques Carrio
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Sound Mix: Nigel Brown
Postproduction: Paul Vincent Schütz, Florian Spies
Supported by: Federal State of Austria, Province of Salzburg, City of Salzburg, City of Vienna



︎ Archive Film