Where Was the Point of No Return

The autobiographical video work Where was the point of no return is a collage of archived video footage that Odenbach recorded during his extensive travels in Europe, Africa, Asia and America between 1984 and 2020. Odenbach applies collage and montage techniques to combine different perspectives and historical layers of time. His works are composed of archive material and his own photographs, which he condenses into visually multi-layered narratives. This structure allows switching between close and distant perspectives: From a distance, his collages appear as closed surfaces, which on closer inspection consist of countless small pictorial elements. In this manner, the surface structure can be grasped as a dynamic arrangement of numerous individual images that illuminate diverse facets of a given topic and prompt the viewer to undertake a detailed analysis of these elements.