A German Youth tells the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (or Red Army Faction), a German revolutionary terrorist group from the 1970s founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society.

During the 1980s economic crisis in Peru, many cinemas closed down for want of an audience. This occurred at the same time as the appearance of VHS and other home video formats. This animated film presents, by way of visual memory, twelve old cinema façades that reflect their particular architecture. The stop motion animation was produced by using recycled cinema coal, which was used in the past as an energy source for projecting 35 mm films.

The longing of many provincials to go to the city is reflected in the music of Lorenzo Palacios Quispe (Peruvian cumbia), known as Chacalón or “the Chicha Pharoah”. The singer became an idol, and his lyrics became part of the popular memory of provincial migrants living in Lima. The video is based on the cartoon of Lorenzo Palacios Quispe, which contained simple, fun drawings of this popular icon. By scratching on pieces of the celluloid with a knife and colouring with felt-tip pins, the images of this cartoon were transferred onto fragments of 35mm celluloid to turn them into an animated story. This was originally presented as an installation, using an old Russian-made projector and accompanied by Chacalón’s songs.

During a month’s residence in an abandoned building (Plattenbau) in Hoyerswerda in eastern Germany, the author created a performance titled 8 Hours Work, as a show of solidarity with coal miners. The performance consisted of remaining standing for eight hours, holding a red carnation in his right hand. This flower (rote Nelke in German) is the symbol of the German Socialist Party, and in the context of the performance represents the balance of forces and conflict of powers between east and west.

In this animation, Alfred Hitchcock wanders the streets of Cajamarca and lima. He is seen posing or taking photographs like in tourist postcards. He visits spaces that have had political connotations because of protests or terrorist attacks. In Cajamarca, Hitchcock is seen chasing the author, who then hides in the old family cinema. Hitchcock is shown in this work with a knife, an analogy with the tool that Pando uses to work on the celluloid. In the final scenes, Hitchcook is chased by young petty thieves who take the form of birds, taking another symbolic element from Hitchcock’s films.

The vignettes that make up this animation reflect the issues of the voluntary exodus that many people experience in crossing the border from Mexico to the USA. The personal experience of a relative of the author’s is used as a starting point to represent, by way of metamorphosis, the personal and collective implications of this move.

The cockroach is an insect that survived the Jurassic era and is resistant to exposure to nuclear radiation. The beetle, which fascinated the ancient Egyptians, is related to the idea of transformation and rebirth. The symbolic transformation of the bug man that moves from the city to the countryside can be seen as a process of survival and rebirth of one insect into another (from a cockroach to a beetle), but also as the sociocultural transformation of a citizen into a political candidate. The idea of transformation, associated with Kafka’s work, refers to a desire of the author to transform himself.

White Lung City tells the story of the author’s alter ego, “the man with black lungs”, who tries to avoid the environmental contamination produced by the smoke from the factories and the rubbish on the streets in Lima city centre. The mapped perspective of the city shows the outline of a lung that the character leaves on it.

Historically, the boat was an element that symbolized the adventure of discovery of an unknown paradise, hard to access. In contrast that this idyllic vision, this performative work symbolizes in an abstract way the journey of thousands of immigrants to the lands where the first colonization plans were laid. For this project, the author collaborated with immigrants living in the Netherlands, who symbolically moved as a group, forming the outline of a boat, from the shores of the North Sea to the city of Amsterdam, to then make their way back to the starting point.

Maids of Honor is a brilliant essay on illusionism, mirrors and perception in art, life and video articulated by Downey as a subjective interpretation of Velazquez’s eponymous Baroque masterpiece. Through a theatrical reenactment of the painting’s pictorial tableau and a re-articulation of its complex perspectival structure, Downey brings to life the spatial dynamics, illustrating the psychological tension of the relationship between viewer subject. Placing Las Meninas in an historical context, Downey relates the painting’s thematics to Spain’s economic and political systems of the late 17th century.

The Looking Glass is a multilayered essay whose visual complexity parallels its subject: the meaning of reflections, illusions and mirrors in Western art, culture and life. In his analysis of the rich iconography of the mirror in painting, including Van Eyck’s Arnolfini wedding portrait, Holbein’s Ambassadors, and Velázquez’s Las Meninas, he reflects on the psychological tension in the relation of the artist, the subjects of the paintings and the viewer beyond. Exploring perceptions of pictorial space, he uses computer graphics to diagram art historian Leo Steinberg’s analysis of perspective systems in Las Meninas. In a subjective illustration of the mirror as a reflection of the subconscious, Downey recalls his own experience of viewing Las Meninas as a young man in Madrid when he immersed himself in the “baroque space of the picture, in a total art experience... similar to orgasm.”

Information Withheld, part of The Thinking Eye series, deconstructs the information contained within the image in a spectacular decoding of the discourses of television and fashion. Foretelling the Baudrillardian prognosis of a supremely ironic culture in which use value and exchange value annul each other within a vertiginous spiral of commodities, Downey exposes the intercultural, global appropriation of the economy of images through the spectacle/metaphor of the fashion show which is seen at the conclusion of Information Withheld.
(The Eruption of Dream Into Study: Notes On the Art of Juan Downey, 1989, John G. Hanhardt).

The third in Downey’s innovative series The Thinking Eye; exploring the nature of perception and the idea of reflectivity, Shifters completes the trilogy begun with The Looking Glass (1980) and Information Withheld (1983). Broadly based in the linguistic principles of shifters, the tape weaves together seven different narrative threads: Napoleon, a cat torturer, Egypt, a silent melodrama, a Leo Steinberg essay on art history, imperialist architecture, and “la working class”; each section commenting on power and the abuse of power. The work represents a bold example of the new narrative trend and, like the two previous tapes in the series, stretches the objective documentary format. The obvious contradictions of the tape, particularly in its political views, make this a thought provoking work; the visual flair of the artist renders it lush to the eye.
(Juan Downey: 20 Years, 1989, Anne H. Hoy)

J.S. Bach is a resonant, personal documentary on the composer that begins with Bach’s last years and ends with Downey’s note of the death of his mother. In continuous counterpoint are the transfiguring power of Bach’s music and the gritty reality of his life; the nature and biography of this man and of the video maker who identifies with him and has played his music since childhood; and the shifting, symbolic relations of art and life for both creators.

Hard Times and Culture is Downey’s last single channel piece, is a series of tapes on the nexus of cultural creativity and economic, political and social forces. Downey subjectively documents periods in which economic hardships coincided with intensified creative output in the fine-arts, literature and culture at large. Part One: ‘Vienna Fin-de-Siecle’ focuses on the Austrian-Hungarian Empire one hundred years ago, when its decline inter-locked closely with the emergence of modernism in the arts and psychoanalysis.”
(From the catalogue Frames of References, The Rockefeller Foundation, Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship Award 1988-1999).

New media researcher Sandra Lischi made this video portrait of Gianni Toti as an experimental documentary, introducing his peculiar intellectual and personal universe, as well as stages in his creative process, which he called “poetronics”. In Lischi’s words: “Poetronics is created, therefore, from the articulation of verbal languages, of writing, of images; but above all, it is the result of the combination of these elements with each other, and with other ‘text’ fragments (musical, theatrical, cinematographic, pictorial quotations or creations?)” In this short documentary the images of Gianni Toti, his house overrun with books and notes, blend with the anecdotes, stories and reflections of the filmmaker.

In 1986, Totti produced with the support of the Society of Computer Music and the City of Sciences and Industry, Paris (La Villette), a series of video creations that discuss everything from the relationship of cosmic theories and the final structure of the universe to the study of the human body. The images of man and machine dialogue harmoniously in these works. Many of these works were made from discussions of Toti’s with recognized researchers. Order, Chaos and Phaos is a piece about the new mental models of emerging science: fractals, strange attractors, cosmic knots; confrontation between the old and the imaginary new, in the prospect of a unitary model of artistic and scientific creativity.

Toti’s collaboration with the RAI –in this case, through the site in the Lombardi region—would lead to this work, made to mark the 900th anniversary of the Università di Bologna. Valeria Magli plays the unbeatable 1920s tennis player Suzanne Lenglen in this videoballet that fuses dance, sport and music (with an original soundtrack by John Cage). The work was projected for the first time in the Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, located in the heart of the University, on 12 October 1990. The years of collaboration with the RAI would later be looked back on with a very critically, renouncing the public network’s work and its continual refusal to give space and support to thought and creation.

This work, the title of which is a play on “origin” and “unpublished”, is Toti’s first computer graphics video. In it he asks questions about this new experience, this binary universe made of zeroes and ones that dance and compose new forms. A challenge, a provocation, this is the numerical image, to which Toti responds with punches of humanistic culture, scientific imaginary, poetic and artistic references. The synthesis images were made at the Atelier Brouillard-Précis, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Culture and Francophonie, the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (DRAC PACA), the Municipality of Marseille, and the Office Régional de la Culture del Centre International de Poésie de Marseille. The synthesis images were created with the Anyflo programme, developed by Michel Bret.

Made by Marko Mormil, Elisa Zurlo and Gianni Toti. The coca gospel, according to the Pacha Maria, the Quechua Madonna, is a legend “for travellers” and “workers of the wind”. It is the story of Galchovang, Mother Earth, and of the hero Sintana, of their daughter Bunkejim and her brother Miuiva, of María Teyuna and of the Shaman “hidden bird”, of hallucinations and “cocatronics”, as told by Mama Quilla and Madre Luna. A short poem sung in the language of the Incas and played on the quena, the Indian flute. A “plant song” of the “little sacred plant” and of the “false ideological consciences” of coca contradictions, beyond the now archaic myths and prejudices about erythroxyline. A short poem for the Cuca Cuca excocaculturally “pachamamacocadanced”.

There is that
which I see
which is shown to me
which I can’t see
which I don’t see
I was invited to film a ritual. One that can be shown to foreigners. A child of the tribe watches Disney’s Fantasia on TV. He is interrupted. What does the child experience when he dances?
What am I able to see from what is shown to me? Shot in the Xucuru-Kariri, in Alagoas, Brazil.

The video, set in Barcelona, shows the artist performing an iconoclastic action. During the night, using fire and a bottle of absinth, Argote sets on fire a statue representing a bishop showing the way to a native. The statue is on the pedestal of the Columbus monument, in the Christopher Columbus circle at the end of the Ramblas, close to the harbour. By setting this symbol on fire, the artist shows all his disapproval of the European vision of colonization, in which Colombus is a hero.

Antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A film-poem of an ecology of signs tracing a colonial history repeating itself: celebration and power relations, objects and fetishes, roots and branches, power and class relations in a struggle to find one’s place and one’s seat at the table.

On 13 November 2014, loudspeakers and a power generator were set up in the Bolivian jungle, near the river Mamoré, a tributary of the Amazon. For hours, El sistema (The System), a text by Eduardo Galeano was played on a loop over the loudspeakers. The uncontrollable and unpredictable forces of nature make the area of Trinidad a sparsely inhabited region, one of the few areas that is still resisting the development of progress, progress understood as a destructive force.

Sector IX B discusses the conservation of an anthropological collection assembled by the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, one of the main operations of colonial collection, through the rereading of the work L’Afrique fantôme by Michel Leiris. The film, shot in Africa, mainly in Senegal, reveals the destiny and memory of archives by means of an imagined story, designating a state of relations between the peoples.

4xAlong follows the flow of water, sewage, the Suez Canal and desire.
Auron Impressions.

4xAlong follows the flow of water, sewage, the Suez Canal and desire.
Minispectacle 7: Along. Spring in the Puddle.

2xAgainst goes with the French Résistance and Occupy Oakland.

2xAgainst goes with the French Résistance and Occupy Oakland.

Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish, the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post.
2xSolo lets fly about children and young families. French leaves.

Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish, the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post.
2xDuo is about falling and feeling.
Duo is navigating with a toddler between Paris-Helsinki.
A man and a tree.

Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish,the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post.
2xTrio is contemplating with twins in a medieval castle in France. Trio inhales and takes a breather.

Minispectacles 9xSolo, Duo, Trio, Quartet portray children, the childish,the childless, twins, moms, the French, french fries, as well as boxes for litter and post.
Halloween in Toronto, Kensington with French Fries, Middle Finger and Trash Can.
Quartet has post boxes in party mood.

Minispectacles Albuquerque Straight visits a man and a lynx in a motel on Route 66.

Minispectacles 6xGood Night wishes good night to north and to west and to Speed Market.

Bottle bobbing.

A bomb explodes in a backwoods, spraying toys.

The blueberry bushes shake. There are ducks picking blueberries. Then a disturbance.

4xAlong follows the flow of water, sewage, the Suez Canal and desire.
Minispectacle 4: Along. Spring in the puddle.

4xAlong follows the flow of water, sewage, the Suez Canal and desire.
Minispectacle 5: Along. A boy in deep waters at the Suez Canal

Performance-based k-pop video connecting religion and Israel’s biblical missile system. A visitor to Vatican city witnesses the apparition of Israel’s biblical missile in the sky while singing to the secret dimension of religion. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.

In Take Me to Church, electronic cyberspace connects a sadomasochist experience with Christian practice: a man exploring voluntary kidnapping becomes confused between fear and sexual pleasure. He realizes that his sexual desire is a kind of death and the ceremony is sacred. For George Bataille, religious sensibility always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish. We see an energy in the story which, when harnessed to a devotion to something or someone, gives the devotee, the submissive, the masochist, the martyr, an ability to do something special, to step outside the limitations of the human. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.

In the film Kokakolachickenwings, thinker Zairong Xiang and artist Luciano Zubillaga collaborate telepathically to propose a film/text that has no beginning and no end. Sounds, indeterminate voices, algorithmic subs and various translations converge by the potency of montage, connecting brain 1 (intestines) with brain 2 (head brain), in the context of cooking, reading and making a film. While cooking, an android voice in the style of Optimus Prime confides: “The theme of the conversation is Instability-of-Human-Reason”. Co-directed by Luciano Zubillaga and Zairong Xiang

Performance-based k-pop video about love, sexuality and war. A decommissioned Royal Navy submarine in a former British imperial dockyard becomes the main theatre for HornyHoneydew a cappella style singing. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.

Cyberspace grows without limits, yet mental time is not infinite. Webcam star Alan do Oro opens up a world to come, where flesh, sexuality and intimacy meet the immense possibilities of cybernetics and the posthuman. Sensuality is in slowness, and the space of information is too extensive and fast to elaborate upon it intensively and deeply. At the point of intersection between electronic science fiction and organic cybertime lies the fundamental matter of contemporary porn. Performed by Alan do Oro. Co-directed by Luciano Zubillaga and Daniel Böhm

A Super 8 tourist film about the Los Angeles landscape through the lens of Filipino immigrants, examining cultural identity by documenting the intersections of American pop culture and Filipino traditions. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices.

Part of the short film anthology Indonesia 9808, in which 10 artists and filmmakers take stock of 10 years of life in the Reformasi period after the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998. Otty plays herself in this video, which stages an impromptu conversation between two women and two men—girlfriends who go way back with each other and husbands who came after. Who were these thirty-somethings a decade ago? Why were they with the student activists in the thick of the insurrectionary crowd? And were they really part of those epoch-defining events? Laughingly, this provocative yet tender video asks where real life is lived and what binds us to each other.

Filmed at the government-run free dispensary at Savda-Ghevra Resettlement Colony in Delhi, as part of a fellowship exploring urban resettlement, this video was amongst several others that were produced spontaneously, attempting to reclaim the style and philosophies of cinema vérité. Through the “performance’’ of the filmmaker and her frame, it bears witness to a moment in the transition between being illegal occupants of the city, to being legally resettled, and the range of negotiations and subjectivities that accompanies this shift.

A pulsating assemblage that crosses moving image tableaux with camera drone and algorithmic images, mor lam with hip hop, and a dandyish voice-over addressing either a spirit or an invisible spectator known only as Chatri. The voice uttering 21st-century stream of consciousness could be that of the artist-persona or it could be that of the drone. Infusing post-human technology with animistic spirit, the mythical naga snake with Angry Birds, Korakrit’s protean work embodies connective ether binding beings across spaces and times. While highly contemporary in its infrastructural aesthetics, the work makes visually contiguous an incommensurable range of political and religious affect in present-day Thailand. In this sense it figures the desire for collectivity for an imploding country with beguiling sincerity.

Phantom Schoolgirl Army is based on a collection of military photographic portraits, and elaborates on the story of North Korean spies disguised as high school girls during the Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion of 1948. The South Korean government used this legend as anti-Communist propaganda.

Cipher Screen is live art cinema using two prepared 16 mm film projectors and a live sound feed. This work harnesses the mechanisms of film and cinema; the projector, the film material, the darkened room and synchronized sound. The imagery begins with loops of completely black film. Two projections are superimposed on the screen and black emulsion is slowly abraded creating star-like piercings, then more linear scratchings, lines crisscross the screen with increasing density, diagonal lines appear, creating an unstable, mutable graphic architecture. It ends with the projection of the ripped, textured, scratched and torn celluloid base in the shape of two crossed frames.

By appropriating and stripping down fragments of the films Nathalie Granger (1972) by Marguerite Duras and En rachâchant by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, scripted by Duras, the author draws a fragile self-portrait of the supposed paradise of childhood, full of conflicts and contradictions, in which the rejection of the structural violence of the family and its roles, as well as the rejection of the imposed hierarchies of traditional knowledge, begin to be seen.

Internal Memory is an exercise in reflection, through a first-person account, on the “forgotten” Galician immigration to Europe in the 1960s and 70s and its consequences, as well as the on way memory is constructed and on the mechanisms that produce history. Through a subjective narrative, this video underlines the possibility of a plural history generated by personal experiences, in contrast to the idea of History and official memory, restricted to the institutional sphere and articulated around the deactivation of political subjects.

That Which Cannot Be Seen Must Be Shown is a visual essay on the memory of the Transition, constructed from some productions of militant film that contradict the official images that have formed our memories of the end of Francoist Spain and the beginnings of democracy. ‘From the duty of memory’, in the words of Primo Levi, María Ruido tackles the construction of historic memory of the Spanish State, but her approach is not based on recorded testimonies, but on the revelation of the lack of images of certain events or issues. The militant films with which this film essay is constructed show what has been left out of the official representation of the agreed memory of the Spanish Transition.

The Duty-Free Zone, a symbol of the trade area of traditional industry, and the so-called Distrito 22@, the new space of logistic and technological capitalism, are the two polar opposites of the tourist-commercial Barcelona of the new millennium, and above all, the large real estate business protected by the umbrella of the post-industrial renovation of the Catalan capital. These two forms of capital fuse together in the new uses of the old port areas, now dedicated to big business call centres and customer service: let’s get ready to leave the loading wharf and enter the call centre to continue working for the big business of gentrification, for the ‘Barcelona brand’.

Samira is a first-year psychology student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her colloquial Hebrew, sartorial choices and mannerisms render her indistinguishable from her Jewish Israeli contemporaries. Guez asks her to recount a recent experience: in the restaurant where she works as a waitress, her Arabic first name evoked racist responses, causing her boss to ask her to change her name to the more Jewish-sounding Sima; they finally settle on Mira. As she recalls the incident and repeats it at Guez’s prodding, she begins to articulate the complexity of her identity and how racism impacts her life.

Guez’s camera dwells on Jacob Monayer in intimate settings with watermelons and sabra cacti. Intermingled with these quotidian moments, Jacob’s son, Samih, recalls his parents process of adjusting to life in Israel after 1948 and the choices they made for their children. The watermelon and the sabra cactus carry symbolic significance linking identity and place within both Palestinian and Israeli cultures.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church it is believed that the souls of the deceased wander the Earth for 40 days when ascension of the soul then occurs; special prayers at the gravesite and in the church are then held in memorial of the departed. The installation offers a deeply personal, familial story: the death of Ya qoub Monayer and his memorial service 40 days later. It also relates to a larger and more complex narrative: the story of the place where he is buried, the Christian Palestinian cemetery in Lod, which has been vandalized by other religious groups. The destruction of the cemetery reflects the position of the Christian Palestinians living in Israel as a minority within the wider Palestinian minority.

Entitled The Painter, this video is the first of five from a new body of work, The Sick Man of Europe. Guez’s project reflects on the military history and current political climate of the Middle East through the creative practices of individual soldiers from the region.
The video presents the story of a painter-turned-soldier, a Jewish Tunisian who immigrated to Israel. The “painter” was conscripted to the Yom Kippur War as a reservist soldier in 1973 and, in recent years, has undergone psychiatric treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, part of which consists of repeatedly recording his memories of the war. These recordings are central to Guez’s new work, and relate directly to his artistic strategy of repetition and storytelling in re-evaluating accounts of the past.

Up And About Again is laid back in the outback. A snow-covered Datsun 100A is driving through a summer landscape. Something inexplicable has turned an otherwise ordinary day upside down. Pain is hidden.

Pik Mama and Missy are spending a boondocks day in a musty, misty thicket sitting with a boiling pot by a smoky campfire, deep in a forest, on a deserted island where weird and bizarre things are happening. Two badly-behaving women in the middle of the forest on a deserted island.

Log Head is an experimental comedy about a birch log that has a soul and a pair of skis. When Log Head is threatened with the final chop, it takes to its skis. Will Log Head’s escape be blocked?

A multimedia performance (with film, video, slides & sound) exploring the supposedly intrinsic concepts of a nationhood through deviations into the Finnish national epic Kalevala, abstruse found footage imagery and optical sounds.

Performance-based k-pop video connecting religion and Israel’s biblical missile system. A visitor to Vatican city witnesses the apparition of Israel’s biblical missile in the sky while singing to the secret dimension of religion. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.

Performance-based k-pop video about love, sexuality and war. A decommissioned Royal Navy submarine in a former British imperial dockyard becomes the main theatre for HornyHoneydew a cappella style singing. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.

Cyberspace grows without limits, yet mental time is not infinite. Webcam star Alan do Oro opens up a world to come, where flesh, sexuality and intimacy meet the immense possibilities of cybernetics and the posthuman. Sensuality is in slowness, and the space of information is too extensive and fast to elaborate upon it intensively and deeply. At the point of intersection between electronic science fiction and organic cybertime lies the fundamental matter of contemporary porn. Performed by Alan do Oro. Co-directed by Luciano Zubillaga and Daniel Böhm

In Take Me to Church, electronic cyberspace connects a sadomasochist experience with Christian practice: a man exploring voluntary kidnapping becomes confused between fear and sexual pleasure. He realizes that his sexual desire is a kind of death and the ceremony is sacred. For George Bataille, religious sensibility always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish. We see an energy in the story which, when harnessed to a devotion to something or someone, gives the devotee, the submissive, the masochist, the martyr, an ability to do something special, to step outside the limitations of the human. Performed by HornyHoneydew. Co-directed by Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga.

In the film Kokakolachickenwings, thinker Zairong Xiang and artist Luciano Zubillaga collaborate telepathically to propose a film/text that has no beginning and no end. Sounds, indeterminate voices, algorithmic subs and various translations converge by the potency of montage, connecting brain 1 (intestines) with brain 2 (head brain), in the context of cooking, reading and making a film. While cooking, an android voice in the style of Optimus Prime confides: “The theme of the conversation is Instability-of-Human-Reason”. Co-directed by Luciano Zubillaga and Zairong Xiang

One of the most prominent and well-crafted films that emerged from the Christoph Janetzko experimental film workshops in Southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, Kalawang is a satirical piece that uses found footage of war, sex, and pop culture to unpick the cultural and libidinal complex of colonization. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices.

The initial idea for the film is the Vietnamese government’s plan to build nuclear power plants in an ancient land once known as Panduranga. Yet the longer the artist spends time in the land that bears traces of its old matriarchal culture the more she feels her intended subject matter slipping from her grasp. A poetic essay film whose intimate portrayal of faces and landscape, and whose incisive self-questioning, subtly undermine the figure of the heroic artist while asking how art can continue to be socially engaged.

Less a documentary than a marvel, as an irreverent parody of science fiction films. A humorous meditation on time, politics, and point of view in cinema. Hoping to send a message back in time by equipping the camera to shoot through Rizal’s portrait on Philippine money, Ermitaño plays with the boundaries of different points of view: Rizal’s, that of Philippine politics, the camera’s, the filmmaker’s, and ours as well as with the temporal relations between them. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices.

Kucheipadar village in Odisha is a bauxite-rich block that since India’s economic liberalization has been the subject of violent conflict between Adivasis and a mining venture. The singing of songs has come to articulate creative forms and political structures that steered the Kashipur resistance movement from subalternity, through solidarity and into dissolution. Blood Earth interweaves the efforts to record song, farming, village life and a political meeting to improvise a junction between voice, music, silence, sound and noise.

This film, constructed with 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film, as well as rewritten texts by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and María Ruido, presents Morocco as a case study, but sets out to reflect on the possibilities of a cognitive justice outside of the hegemonic system of knowledge and representation (in all senses the system of representation) and, by extension, ask to what extent true visual sovereignties are possible and what political potentialities they have.

May 28th, 2011, Orle´ans. Inmates gave a concert inside the prison. The sound was broadcasted outside for the audience.

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed.
A few people cried.
Most people were silent.”

“You don’t know what we are.”

If politics were to come back, it could only be from its savage and disreputable fringe. Then, a muffled rumor shall arise whence that roar is heard: “We are scum! We are barbarian!”
(Alain Brossat).

Beauty and/or destruction.

France, summer 1944. The public punishment of women accused of having affairs with Germans during the war?

Today’s been sad.
Tomorrow won’t get any better.
Let’s un-do it all over again.

Remember
That I am the cause of your journey.
Don’t leave me on that way

We are many, we are uniforms, we smile in the pictures, but we are NOT happy.

Fokus is a stirring viewing experience. It is based on an extremely minimal visual form: contrasts, textures and glowing colors. Its visual language consists of highly magnified and slowed images. Surface of the film material, the film grain and other anomalies function as integral parts of the whole. Van Ingen’s rigorous structuralist methods have produced beautiful, emotionally touching and many-layered results. Fokus is as close to the art of painting as cinema can possibly strive to be.
(Mika Taanila).

Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.

The Sequence of Hanna Ave is the result of my reworkings of some experimental film practices and my enquiries into the phenomena of the movement-illusionism in the film form. By combining found footage, hand processing and hi-end digital technology, I attempt to elevate a few mundane gestures into a new perceptible wholeness, and give some little fingers and an audio cassette all the attention, grace and drama they deserve.

Exactly is some re-arranged found footage with its original sound track re-united. By omitting just the name of the protagonist I have turned this recycled strip of film (cut for recycling purposes from a 35 mm screening print into a 16 mm leader by an unanimous lab years ago—thus the undulation of images) into three meditations on the international market economy.

The first embodiment of a concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren’´s Trees In Autumn, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow’s later work. In this film, perception of material relationships in the world is seen to be no more than a product of the structural activity in the work. Art forms experience (Malcolm Le Grice).

For his film Tree again (1978), Kren used a highly sensitive infra-red color film, a type which usually has to be developed within a very short period of time. However, Kren who always worked on a very small budget, only had a roll of film which was already five years past its expiry date and, as Kren says, “there was little likelihood of anything turning out on the film.” But he still decided to take shots of a large and splendid tree surrounded by bushes and a stretch of pastureland over a period of several weeks, from summer to autumn– a series of individual pictures taken from the same camera position. Kren’s illogical hope and his unshakeable confidence in his material were rewarded. Tree Again became one of Kren ´s most beautiful works

The camera with a sun shade is mounted on a heavy tripod in front of a window. Over 21 consecutive days the view outside is filmed from this perspective. The same three rolls of film (totalling 90 metres) are used one after the other each day while the mask in front of the camera lens is changed every day. Each of the 21 masks made of black cardboard has four or five small rectangular openings: all these openings together would give the full view. For each take (one day) not only the mask is used, but sometimes the diaphragm is closed completely. This change differs from take to take. The picture is changing constantly. Sometimes only a portion of the emulsion is exposed, and the other area remains unexposed.

Black Movie II is a film without a camera, consisting solely of coloured frames; the number of frames for each colour had been drafted in advance on graph paper according to a predetermined scheme. At this time, by the end of the 1950s, Adrian developed not only a pioneering concrete and neo-constructive, kinetic and optical vocabulary as a painter, but also extended his innovative concepts to embrace film starting his Filmblock series.

In Adebar, only certain shot lengths are used and the image material in the film is combined according to certain rules. For instance, there is a consistent alternation between positive and negative. The film‘s images are extremely high contrast black and white shots of dancing figures; the images are stripped down to their black and white essentials so that they can be used in an almost terrifyingly precise construct of image, motion, and repeated sound.
(Fred Camper).

Kubelka’s achievement is that he has taken Soviet montage one step further. While Eisenstein used shots as the basic units and edited them together in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has gone back to the individual still frame as the essence of cinema. The fact that a projected film consists of 24 still images per second serves as the basis of his art.

In NAVIGATOR, Björn Kämmerer films a set of vertical mirrors with bevelled edges in monumental close-up, and vigorously edits them in a back-and-forward motion that offers a dizzying array of Cubist perspectives.

Optical Sound is a homage to optical sound. The directors step to the background, the composer, at the start of the film. The hierarchy is broken, music is paramount. The composer receives raw material, abstract sounds from which he creates a rhythm made up of sounds, scratches, and voices--fragments of head and tail leaders.
Only now does the original image fit with the present composition. Parts in which the picture ´s dominance represses the sound are excluded. The rhythm of the composition has written itself into the image.

In front of the camera: Valie Export, Peter Weibel. In Hernals, documentary and pseudo-documentary procedures were filmed simultaneously by two cameras from different viewpoints. The material was then divided into phases of movement. In the montage each phase was doubled. The techniques used in this process vary. Also the sound was doubled, again using different techniques. Two realities, differently perceived according to the conditions of this film, were edited into one synthetic reality, where everything is repeated. This doubling up destroys the postulate: identity of copy and image. Loss of identity, loss of reality (e.g. schizophrenia).

The perception of the city in the modern era is characterized by its fleeting and momentary nature. Social and architectural constructions are fragmented and dashing past. Cityscapes attempts to make archived recordings from the Austrian Film Museum legible along these lines. Single images are isolated from the cinematographic flow in order to scrutinise their inscribed cognitive potential. For Walter Benjamin, history disintegrates into images and not stories. Cityscapes is a search along the tracks of these images.

A “color sound film made without a camera or musical instruments” is how Amos Vogel described Loops by Norman McLaren, who painted sound and images onto a strip of 35mm film in 1948. In a similar way Christoph Weihrich’´s Red Nitro does without this technical equipment. Frames were colored red by hand, and a white “observation slit” in widescreen format was made with the aid of stencil. The titles and frames from a found Super 8 film were pasted inside it, and the sound was stamped onto the soundtrack in a way similar to the found footage.

Interior and exterior space blur in a frenzied staccato layering of digital imagery, creating the film’s distinctive sphere of subjective experience. The spectator penetrates the medium’s imaginary interior drawn in by the undertow of glimmering pictures. A subtle game of perception assembled from 36 individual frames.

After a sojourn in a more contemplative series of films observing the looming ominousness of large scale architecture, Johann Lurf returns to the frenetic structural analysis of found footage with Twelve Tales Told. A dozen logos for Hollywood production companies play before you as they would precede a normal Hollywood production; appropriately in 3D if watching digitally, in 2D on 35 mm—and self-aggrandizing in any format.
Only, each logo sequence, some animated with glossy grandeur (Disney, Paramount), some more restrained (Regency, Warner Bros.), is stutteringly interwoven image by image into the others, beginning with the longest and ending with the shortest.

It is a study of movements, colors, and shapes. The visual effects were created through, not a lens, but an adjustable slit, which was attached in front of the image sensor of a DV camcorder, while shooting at Washington Square, San Francisco. I was changing the length of the slit and rotating the angle to change the visual effect, while listening to the sound at the location.

As a painter carries a sketchbook, I carried a Super 8 camera and did single framing as an everyday exercise, shooting shapes and lines found in the public space to make an animation. The entire film was edited in camera and hand-processed.

The second film in the series, showing my study especially in apparent shapes—a shape that cannot be found in a single frame but only through a series of consecutive frames.

The third film in the series, showing a series of paired images, a blurred image with diagonal camera movement followed by the same image with static shot, later showing an experiment to produce the apparent depth by rotating an apparent shape.

The fourth film in the series, focusing on colors and shapes. It was shot on Kodachrome and processed at Dwayne's Photo.

The last film in the series, which I shot at the site of Marin Headlands in California. The footage shows the nature in the area, as well as the historic buildings originally built for the US Army, including batteries and the Nike Missile Site.

A study in visual rhythm with images of architecture in Manhattan, New York, using the technique I used to shoot the first sequence for Sketch Film #3. All edited in-camera and hand-processed afterwards. This film is commissioned by Echo Park Film Center.

The visual was originally captured through two Super 8 cameras, each attached on the pedal of the bicycle, while riding from Marin County to San Francisco, then optically printed onto 16 mm film. The double projection shows a new landscape of the photogenic city. The ride ended after joining Critical Mass, an event occurs every last Friday of a month in San Francisco.

It was shot through a still camera, Nikon F3, at Lumphini Park in Bangkok, Thailand. The hand-processed visual shows the organic patterns found in the monumental park, constructing the systematic yet emotional rhythms and paces on the screen, accompanied by the sound from the visual information on the optical soundtrack area. Lumphini is named for Lumbini, a Sanskrit word of the birthplace of the Buddha in Nepal, and 2552 is the Buddhist year (Buddha Era) of 2009.

It was shot through a still camera with 16 lenses, which would take a series of 16 images consecutively within a few seconds in two rows on the area of two regular 35 mm frames for still photography, similar to a movie camera or a device that Eadweard Muybridge created to photograph a horse galloping. The film shows Tokyo Racecourse, when it was holding the biggest race of the year, Japanese Derby (Tokyo Yushun) in 2008. The excitement of each race lasts about 2 minutes and 30 seconds in this racecourse.

I buried a 100-foot (about 30 meters) 35 mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, for about six hours, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil. This film was exposed to the possible remains of the radioactive materials.

All images were filmed on Market Street, one of the main streets in San Francisco. I used Sketch Film #1 and Sketch Film #2 as reference to make the structure of the film. The visual was carefully composed frame by frame, while shooting on the street. This project was commissioned by Exploratorium and San Francisco Arts Commission for the outdoor screening event A Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005: An Outdoor Centennial Celebration.

This is about Times Square, the noises and movements at this most well-known intersection. I used a color separation technique, it was originally shot on black and white films through color filters, red, green, and blue, then optically printed onto color films through these filters. The layered images of shots by handheld camera would agitate the scenes, and the advertisements on the digital billboards try to pull ahead of others.

JR (Japan Railway Company) Yamanote Line is one of the Japan's busiest lines, consisting of 29 stations and running as a loop. The film shows the views from the platforms of 10 stations in Yamanote Line, from Tokyo Station to Ebisu Station clockwise. The in-camera visual effects and the layered soundtracks may exaggerate the sense of the actual locations, while suggesting the equipment that was used for capturing the audio and visual.

As a sequel to Tokyo-Ebisu, this film shows the views around the exits of twenty stations in JR Yamanote Line, from Shibuya Station to Tokyo Station clockwise.

It displays bridges on the Yahagi River, which runs near where I grew up in Japan. I shot each bridge twice, first in the morning and second in the evening. One sixth of the frame was exposed at a time and the result shows the sense of the sun rising or setting.

In Maas Observation Karel Doing and Greg Pope demonstrate their fascination in the bizarre landscape of the port of Rotterdam, a stretch of “neo-nature” with little place for humans, where huge machines seem to move around according to a logic of their own. The film begins with images of windmills on the edge of the Maas plain in a montage sequence based on the steady rhythm of the rotating sails. The focus gradually shifts towards activities on the river further upstream. The montage tempo slows down as the mechanical motion gives way to the play of reflections in the water.

Whirlwind is collaboration between Bea Haut, Ben Hayman, Karel Doing and Greg Pope. The origins of this film came from documents shot during the preparation and the execution of several collective performances carried out by the British group Loophole and the Dutch artist Karel Doing. Using frame by frame, long exposures and optical effects, these performances were manipulated and intensified. The essence of cinema, writing with light, is portrayed as a hallucination.

Crashing through the Arctic ice and snow—a journey to Joes’ grave, 1934—wrapped up in the chaotic beauty of the church bells of England—white light vision.

Single frame bursts of material divided into four themes: city, window, mountains and people. A visual punctuation of time coordinated with a soundscape recording.

A digital haiku, a meditation on the moon, sky, sea and snow.

Shards of emulsion layered and structured onto clear 35 mm.

Stenciled film using lyrics from the classic The Fall’ss track.

Film blasted with a shotgun.

Extreme close up and slowed image from north Iceland.

Looks at the Italian city struggling with rising sea level and the inundation of more and more tourists.

IN TRANSIT is an observed portrait of spaces of air travel. It is an around-the-world journey from San Francisco to Shanghai; Beijing to London; Frankfurt to Mexico City to Los Angeles in 21 minutes. Flown, shot, and edited by Chip Lord.

Landscape portrait of Amarillo, Texas that begins and ends at Cadillac Ranch. Amarillo is a crossroads for transportation and travelers and Route 66 passes through. Music by Hayden Pedigo gives the work a structure of eight songs. Scenes include Amarillo Ramp by Robert Smithson, a Truck stop named Love, a coal train, and Cadillac Ranch by Ant Farm (1974) which has become a roadside attraction.
Premiere screening in Buenos Aires and additional screenings at Basement films, Albuquerque and the VideoFest, Dallas, Texas. Produced and Directed by Chip Lord. Cinematography by Christopher Beaver. Sound mix by Jim Mckee.

Freeze Frame is the best example of a filmic significator from which the transparency and invisibility has been removed. Material which has been repeatedly re-filmed (a construction site, a rubbish incinerating plant, industrial graveyards, an antenna and line-drawing like frame that continually falls over) are exposed on top of each other. The result is that an unambiguous reading of the picture, to say nothing of their positioning in a fictive room, cannot even be attempted. This type of calculated picture removal is carried to the point where the film strip is stopped in the projector (and hence the title) and burns.
(Michael Palm)

Photographic processes—the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing, and in the case of film, projecting—function as metaphors for psychological processes. What Tscherkassky does is to take various tropes of 1960s structural filmmaking (derived from Landow, Kubelka, Frampton, Gehr and Sharits) and run them through a Lacanian psychoanalytic sieve. In both form and psychological content, Parallel Space is deeply reflexive.
(Amy Taubin, “Flash Floods: Parallel Space: Inter-View”)

Happy-End is a found footage film: the reworking of someone else’s home movies from the 1960s and 70s. The sequences selected are taken from many hours of the staged private life of “Rudolf” and “Elfriede”, pivoting on demonstrative celebrations, alcohol and cake consumption together.

Not a stage direction, but rather something very concrete is hidden behind the technical term. Something which betrays a little of the yearning for intelligent and playful dealings with the medium of short film....
(Marli Feldvoss)

Tscherkassky’s recent, most beautiful film Coming Attractions creates a complex mosaic of cross-references—both formal, between shots, and historical, between periods and genres. This film demonstrates the extreme textual density found footage can achieve, interweaving early cinema, the avant-garde and commercial advertising. ... It explores the solicitation of the viewer’s attention and desire implied by the term “attraction,” through the coy glance and the revealing display. In the Kuleshov tradition, Tscherkassky absolutely creates a new film from his found footage, but still he delivers to us discoveries drawn from the original footage, revelations about the nature of film and our fascination with it.
(Tom Gunning)

The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also at the mercy of the filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through a tearing of the film itself.
Our hero then descends into Hades, the realm of shades. Here, in the underground of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing instructions, the means whereby the existence of every filmic image is made possible. In other words, our hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility, the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shade.

Lisl Pongers peaceful, hovering travel and daily life pictures, assembled associatively instead of narratively, develop here into a reflexion on photography itself, to an examination of unknown alphabets: Geometric forms develop out of the world’s chaos. (Alexander Horwath).

Definitely Sanctus deals with Alpine customs and traditions and is composed of scenes from Austrian films from the fifties belonging to the genre of ‘’Heimatfilme“, sentimental narratives based in idealized rural settings.(Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl)

In 9/64 O Christmas Tree Kren offers a more visually descriptive development of a Muehl “action”. The images have been chosen to follow a more dramatic sequence, probably because the action itself contained a wide range of images and materials. (Stephen Dwoskin)

The basic material consisted of about thirty photos showing some close friends, and a dead pig we had found on a road. The pictures of the pig are used as a symmetrical motion montage. I took proper and left/right-inverted photos which are moved back and forth symmetrically over the central axis. The introduction scene shows Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus, cross-fading the figures at both sides and following the title, also Venus with a symmetrical pig montage. A detail of Boticelli’s picture appears at the end of the film on a wrapper of a deodorant (sniff). Three Beatles songs emphasize the performance with their text. The pig is used as a symbol for the woman as a victim. It also stands for any associations to pig as proverbial: poor swine, greedy pig.

In NavelFable Mara Mattuschka subjects herself to a second birth through endless pairs of tights. Her body struggles so hard and in such a deformed manner from out of the layers of nylon that the sheer struggle for survival becomes visible.

(Peter Tscherkassky)

Releasing Poetry and Truth, said Peter Kubelka, required some courage. A great many people who think highly of his previous film oeuvre could have been disappointed. The filmmaker himself claimed to have undergone a radical change in position, from the role of perfectionist artist to that of hunter and gatherer. For this reason the footage for three commercial spots which makes up Poetry and Truth must be considered intentionally gathered rather than found footage.

At the beginning of 1965 Kren showed his action films in Berlin. Otto Muehl, who was becoming more and more interested in the controlled documentation of his actions, meets Ernst Schmidt Jr. who fitted in better with his ideas. In May, Ernst Schmidt Jr. filmed the actions Rumpsti Pumsti and Bodybuilding. In this period Muehl conceived his actionist works almost exclusively for photographic and filmic documentation. The necessity for a spontaneous confrontation with the public, which played a major role in Muehl ‘s later actions, does not yet apply to these works (Hubert Klocker).

A superlatively crafted film which uses the psychology of sight deprivation to keep the viewer in suspense: you are allowed only the merest glimpses of what is really going on. The cumulative effect as a mental picture starts to grow is at once titillating and disturbing. Director Dietmar Brehm knows exactly how to tempt our darker desires.

In this grotesque found footage film close-ups of 65 actors playing Adolf Hitler in movies created between 1940 and today are combined in shot/countershot-manner. The soundtrack was produced by the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang. No other historical figure of the 20th century was portrayed more often in movies and by so many different actors than Adolf Hitler. (Only Jesus Christ has more appearances in cinema history—but with a headstart of more than 50 years.) In this grotesque and uncanny identity parade Adolf Hitler is presented as an undead who is impersonated by an alarming number of revenants.

Conference is part five of my notes on film series, which deals with theoretical and historical subjects in film.

Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have the Time: Originally 45 minutes, now 15! Michael Snow’s film Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of avant-garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In February 2003, Snow created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture.

A meditative journey through Expo 67, revisiting a significant moment in Canadian history using manipulated imagery taken from educational and documentary films. Footage has been reworked using tints, toners and photochemical techniques to create a vibrant collision of colors, textures and forms.

Beginning with an afternoon drive down a Los Angeles highway, Overpass weaves together intimate stories of histories of racial and domestic violence against the backdrop of the infamous OJ Simpson car chase in 1994. In this lyrical, experimental short, filmmaker Kami Chisholm draws from television news reports, archival footage, and her own family history to explore the gaps between celebrity spectacle and the mundane realities of interpersonal violence endemic to US society.

Filmmaker’s insightful contemplation of life, present and past. Shot in Vienna. 16 mm and Super8. Hand processed.

Queer Ecologies is a diary style, video text piece, made up of one or two sentence installments. Instead of addressing “Dear Diary,” or God, the writer directs her internal musings to a Mushroom, or the larger organism that a mushroom springs from, a Mycelium. While the writer expresses her personal struggles and misgivings about the human condition, she compares her experiences to the supernatural life of the mushroom species. The language is both scientific and poetic.

The video Methylenedioxymethamphetamine documents through macro-cinematography the landscape of the drug MDMA. The combination of reflective abstractions with techno music creates an in-depth and eery meditation on rave culture.

Aturquesada is a performance-based project playing with the color tealquoise, a word coined by the artist to describe a greenish color that exists in between turquoise and teal. This performance takes place in a snowy landscape that is typical during Canadian winters. The violence inflicted upon the main character and her demise is absurd and humorous. This performative project is inspired by the artist’s connection to the winter Canadian landscape as an immigrant, as well as the emotionally violent nature of a brutal cold winter. This symbolic death by tealquoise is also part of a larger body of work that includes objects painted in the same color and various performance-based videos in which the artist sells tealquoise objects on the streets where informal economic activities occur.

Buildings rise from the rubble, defying gravity to re-imagine their fate and the possibility of affordable housing for all.

“Toward the insignificant” was the Oblique Strategy card that inspired this VHS collaboration. With representational images of a local landmark, the image gradually decays until it is replaced completely with abstraction. Two VHS decks were joined together and plugged into one side of a handmade DIY video mixer, while the other input of the mixer was connected to a VHS camera running a feedback loop. The starting image running on the loop was a static image of a telecommunications tower in the centre of Moncton which, in recent years, has become almost useless. Using the homemade video switcher, we switched between the inputs of the looping image and the raw feedback until the tower disappeared entirely into the abstract non representational imagery of the feedback.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you X-rayed a skeleton at a dance club? This experimental cut-out animation offers something of an answer. Besides dancing between abstract shapes throughout the video, the skeleton character cuts out a pair of pants from some paper, tries them on and runs away. The footage is processed using a variety of analog video synthesizers, including a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device (aka Wobulator). The electronic voltage of the soundtrack by LA’s DVA Damas directs the parameters of certain effects. Artwork, animation, processing and editing done by Emily Pelstring while in residence at the Experimental TV Center (an archive of early video systems), December 2010.

A single-subject portrait of a young Nunamiut athlete through the practice of his sport, which focuses on the materiality of film and its surface textures.

Biomorphic shapes at play in this film reiterate and expose the persistence of vision, frame flickering and illusions. The random cycling images question who is the projector and who is the projectionist, while light forms the sound frequencies. The images have been collected over the last 10 years, constructed from mushroom spore prints, directly printed onto 35 mm film, then optically printed in black and white. The result was scanned in order to be composed onto the final short video. The sound was made during a film performance with the deconstructed film elements shown through an overhead projector in Vienna on March 2016. A remix of the live sound recorded from a 16 mm projector during the performance was kept and now constitutes the audio for the composite image.

A kaleidoscopic search for desire trapped inside a volcano. Famous Diamonds is a short film that studies lies, love, and desire by weaving together a diary narrative and an exploding icon. Composed of various image-making techniques, Famous Diamonds is a hand-painted, hand-processed tour of the dissolution of one’s internal image of desire.

The narrative problem is about the main achievement of human communication—TV set. Art activity serves as a means for realization of social sexual-food complexes.

Vadim Koshkin, a pupil of Vladimir Kobrin, has in inherited in many ways the “handwriting” of his teacher, which is evident in his artistic style and his interest in problems in the life of the person in his modern technological information space. A new peculiar focus of the subject Vanitas (Vanity of Vanities), popular with painters of the 17th century, is now converted to new realities and implemented by means of new technologies. Koshkin’s video was created with the help of computer mounting. His subject is not represented as a stiff and mournful speculation about the caducity of existence and the vanity of efforts, but rather as an exposure of precipitance of a vital flow to a person where everything is now transformed into information units, thus overflowing consciousness with the infinite flowing.

Shutov and Novikov’s work is deliberately infantile and naïve, which contradicts the huge panels of hardly distinguishable images with a peculiar irony, that is characteristic of post-modernist art. It demonstrates the combination of local opinion of “low culture” with naïve symbolism to create a heraldic language. Video animation becomes an already peculiar emancipation of plots of Timur Novikov, where figures of characters turn into aloof entities.

The movie System of Own TV introduces the video project “Person, Word, TV,” which was produced by Studio of Egocentric Features. The artists’ concept of Studio is close to a series of art projects of Gehry Shim of the beginning of the 1970s, “Landart” and “TV-gallery” which are carried out in TV-space, new to the artist, and emphasizing unity of the artist and work of art. The idea uniting artists from different countries and generations was reduced to only one concept: “On the television the artist can reduce the work to expression of a position, the simple gesture corresponding to his concept. The trinity of the unity of the concept, the visual embodiment and the artist who has generated this idea becomes a work of art” (Gehry Shim).

These video is conceived as video documentation of the Russia’s First International Festival of Experimental Video, Computer Animation and Projective Synthesis. The festival took place in a squat in Petrovsky Boulevard in March, 1994. Movies Videostsenary, Dance&Video—part of Russia’s first video catalog—are documentation of that festival. Dirigie, desde 2000, los programas “Media of the Forum” del Moscow International Film Festival.

The video piece by Sergei Shutov from the 1990s in which Soviet films are edited with the help of modern computer technology in order to create an “other vision” from a science-fiction film with a strange situation in which a stranger is sitting in front of a television. Sergei Shutov’s video, in the aesthetics of MTV, was made well before the introduction of the TV giant MTV. The experiments of Shutov with image and sound in this work are merged together in order to demonstrate the absurdity of the influence which the TV mediator has on the viewer.

The events of Radekovets are supposed to interfere with a natural social landscape, in order to change of its sense. On transitions there is an accumulation of the people waiting for green light. There are con only five people with banners which would go ahead of the crowd to turn the street crossing to a demonstration. A demonstration is already a social event of other sense, a plot for news, “snack for mass media.” The basis of Radekovets is a provocation against modern reality which is possible through the “cinematic”. It is possible to compare what was made by artists with Kuleshov’s installation (i.e. the mood and value of ordinary action changes depending on the context in which it is located).

The performance was made in Berlin in Volker und Freude gallery in connection with the exhibition devoted to Robert Rauschenberg. A scene of action is a spacious hall with eclectic architectural details, with a stone floor and mirrors which doors leave in a garden. There is a table close to an entrance on which there are about 39 glasses of vodka and which also displays Soviet military awards. “Trophy” music is playing. The artist, dressed in a black knee-length gown (a neutral dress), invites someone from the audience to dance with her. After several detours on the hall with the partner, she drinks vodka, breaks a glass against a floor and pins one of the awards to herself. Partners change, the artist gets drunk while the floor is covered with broken glass.

Despite the small clip that is Homourbanas, it is still a full film. All arsenal of graphic means of cinema and video (parallel mounting, effects of animation) is involved in it. The artistic image is a result of mixing several clear visual quotes. Although performance is rather important, it still is only one of the tools to create a kinoform. The concept of the clip describes this video work in the best way. Using the mix method, the artist designs the artificial world which is similar to those created for music videos or advertisements. Such a world assumes an irrational and sensual method of perception and its form is a result of the development of an aesthetics of modernism. The genre of such a video can be determined as a screen.

The criticism of global media system is the main concept divided by AES. A photo series and video, Who Wants to Live Forever draws attention not only to mass media sources, which exploit sexual scandals and deaths of celebrities, but also the exhibitionist behavior of the famous. As Woody Allen once said, “the highest achievement in the career of a star when one doesn’t create anything, except the image of his/her own face on the screen, is his/her death”.

The work Lola is a performance for the camera. The style of the film (the fixed camera, absence of a montage, an original sound) emphasizes authenticity of action. Lola can be classified as an intimate art diary which, for example, can be seen in the frank action of the artist in front of the camera. A very widespread genre of video, which in English is called “acting out,” used, for example, by Vito Acconci, Roman Signer, and from an artist from the 1990s, Pyerik Soren. The genre is provocative because of the frankness of its action, and at the same time, on a deeper subconscious level, it researches different psychological, cultural, and social realities.

Men in protective pea jackets and gray soldier’s caps with earflaps, and blue plastic caps from large mineral water bottles covering their noses. Is it a construction battalion? Is it a demobee on a guardroom whether they are “temporarily delayed” in a pre-trial detention center? In the background there are two-storey plank beds, wooden benches, a wooden desktop, and a wooden door with a window for distribution of food. There is nothing to do. They absolutely don’t care. Therefore with enviable commitment these men dramatize “video performances”. The distributing window has turned into a screen of a puppet theater. Absurd sketches from army and prison life serve as a catalyst for a discourse of modern art. In absence of the audience, the actors become the audience.

In short film Vot, five actors perform a composition formed by speech. Synchronization—a moment of harmony in this performance—occurs when the Russian word vot is pronounced and a length of singing is similar in musical and compositional logic to vot.

Rehlen is shot in between mountain villages Tsada and Ahalchi, Republic of Dagestan, it has a simple narrative: a young man is wearing a traditional sheepskin coat timug, usually worn by shepherds, and he attempts to scramble as close as possible to the flock of sheep. A literal interpretation of this work concerned with local nature or traditional cultural symbols, has a supportive function towards the content of the work—a question, “What is the goal behind performers’ actions?” Rehlen deals with problem of social relations that demand consent with certain rules and regulations for social and cultural integration. This work is about what we are ready to do in order to become a part of community.

Ding Shiwei questions the remains of ancient utopias, reviving the order “thou shalt not kill” and its incarnations in history. Man creates himself and destroys himself. In the Old Testament, God on Mount Sinai hands down to Moses the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile, Nietzsche tells us that God is already dead.

A village loosely inspired by a North Korean propaganda village, Kijong-dong. Hayoun Kwon reveals a setting and invites us into a fiction carrying out the journey by proxy. This film testifies to this ghost town in its true state as a mechanism of fiction. The reality of a border confronted with its staging. This village can only be reached within our imagination.

A visual and soundscaped short ambience voyage through a utopian, ghost-like city-state. In this mid-twentieth century imaginary Lisbon, the power plants continue to produce energy, brand new subway network locomotive engines hum in standby, city lights and neon signs come alive each night and radio receivers spread Salazar’s [Portuguese dictator] speeches—yet, nowhere is to be found the slightest human presence: there isn’t anyone to see and hear this newcomer modernity’s heartbeat. Only statues and facades inhabit the metropolis. Cinza is a short film made entirely from photographs that depict Lisbon during the dictatorial regime installed in Portugal from 1926 until 1974.

Composed of various quotes—belonging to political speeches, debates and proclamations—that extract and emphasize the iconoclasm of architecture, art and monuments, the film creates an original conversation between four characters. A Nation Builder, a Pragmatist, a Conservationist and an Artist/Architect become a reflection of ideological deliberation facing a practical scruple. Including words drawn from Regan’s speech on the Berlin Wall, Prince Charles’s 1984 address at Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Isis bloggers’ proclamation on the demolishment of temples, the film’s storyline uses language that endorses demolition and redesign, which were to aid the creation of new displays for ensuing nation-states or ideological positions throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Nazis set up a concentration camp in Ebensee. Nürnberg and Peuker wonder what conclusions they can draw from the topography about dealing with the past. The takes remain static; a woman’s voice dryly contributing information from off screen is all that clarifies the context within contemporary history. A site that looks like a dirt road turns out to be the Löwengang (Lion’s Walk), which the camp’s prisoners were driven down like animals to reach a tunnel that had to be dug. As soon as the film moves to the residential area that was founded on the site of the concentration camp shortly after the end of the war, surprise at the lack of sensitivity in dealing with the past mixes into the off-screen commentary. What Zement aims to get at is the ambiguity of this proximity of commemorative site and settlement.

UNresolved reflects on the 20th anniversary of genocide in Srebrenica, where in 1995 more than 8000 men and boys were systematically murdered by the Bosnian Serb army of Republika Srpska (VRS). The title relates to the UN Security Resolution 819, passed on the 16th April 1993, declaring Srebrenica as a “safe” area for refugees—the prelude to what was the largest act of genocide in Europe since the Holocaust. Following Haughey’s earlier work in Bosnia, between 1998 and 2002, he gained exclusive access to buildings and atrocity sites in Serb controlled territory, areas that have hitherto been off limits. Since completing the film, in early 2015, the building where the Dutch UN was based has been renovated. As a result UNresolved it is also an important historical document which captures the building in its original state.

A city designed and planned only becomes a city when its diverse elements take on autonomy; when they learn to speak for themselves, inventing a grammar with its own rules.
A city becomes a city when a leaf falls from the tree and recognizes the land it lands on, or when the sleepy city sighs quietly with the pain and pleasure of existence.

The air that comes from the chest in multiform voices, in street trading, is not the same air that shakes the multicolour awnings that protect the owners of those same voices from sun and rain. Two different weights configure the delicate balance of life on the streets in Mexico City.

A child possessed by a hybrid entity (Mexican wrestling and Japanese superheroes) offers the ancestral indigenous a hoedown.

From the window of my room I saw a street of wet sand and, in the rain, two bodies of children who loved each other fighting and fought each other loving.

The film describes the journey of a soap bubble that examines the empty rooms of a house under refurbishment.

Soap bubbles bursting. Flies jumping. The beat of microphenomena to the rhythm of a toy pianola.

The conjunction of light and shadow, shapes, colours and textures that reveal the necessary interrelationship of all that is alive and kicking.

After Carnival, with the melancholy sunset of Ash Wednesday, the ants begin their profane, multicolour fiesta, to the rhythm of the samba in a matchbox.

Between is the place and the moment of passing. What separates what is inside from what is outside, what passes from what remains, what goes through what is left.

A hypnotic parable about coming of age in a shifty world of slipping terms, “found” in the optically mesmerized fragments of a home market movie about a chimpanzee’s high adventures at Coney Island. A new story is rendered from the filmic vocabulary of the lighthearted original by moving in on background details, slowing down fleeting actions and shifting the psychology of the frame. Last Lost is a silent film in spirit, trying to speak without words, like some dreams.
(E.H.)

Passersby at Astor Place in New York City speak silent volumes as they move by the mirrored surface of a diner window. I wanted to capture the unscripted choreography of the street, its dance of gazes and riddle of identities. This film is informed by the work of the Lumière brothers, with an eye to permeating an authority of the static camera and establishing a question as to who is watching whom (E.H.)
This Goffmanesque study of how people perform their identities is an enactment of the urban ballet city theorists have described. (Janine Marchessault)

Unwitting constellations of meaning rise to a surface of understanding at a place outside of worldly time. This premise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. An unexpected interior unfolds, made palpable by a trauma that remains abstract. The world as seen in a teardrop of milk.
(E.H.)

I was imagining a collaboration of parallel worlds or a kind of doubled consciousness, a sense of the corporeal and the riddle of absence. The body of the film depends on a spine of interlocking contrasts in the form of negative and positive space, day and night shots, under and above water elements. These are cut on motion and qualities of light that are sometimes gentle and sometimes jarring, to convey the tender labor of hosting a balance. A crossing of paths behind the seen in the wake of one who no longer walks the curve of the world.
(E.H.)

A found footage film that taps into the poetic tradition of the language cut-up, while taking filmic advantage of the 26-frame displacement between sound and image inherent to the optical soundtrack system of 16 mm film. The magenta-shifted fragments of an educational film on “Reaching Your Reader” reveal their chemistry where the splicing tape ripped a “ruby skin” of the emulsion away from the base of the film, leaving a green tear at the edit points. Ruby Skin is a material homage to the disappearing medium and some of its idiosyncrasies. (E.H.)
A jarring rhythmic hiccup is introduced into the original films, impeding our cognitive ability to see through to the image, throwing us back to the filmstrip itself. (Mike Kiscinski)

The first film I ever made consists of the first roll of film I ever shot, entitled One. I made it for the first film class Keith Sanborn taught, in 1978 at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Buffalo, when he was a graduate student working with Hollis Frampton. I was 17. The assignment was to make a film using one roll of Super 8 film, without moving the camera. The result is a kind of poetic/cinematic one-liner. It is in tune with the structuralist spirit of the day—to my surprise.
(E.H.)

A slow motion blow-up to 35 mm foregrounds the kinetic serendipity of a handhold portrait shot in 1980 and entirely edited in-camera. At the time I explored the groundbreaking portability and technical features of Super 8 to capture the wild intensity of my dog Juice as we played in a down and out neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. In 2009 I treated the film as an objet trouvé—without bettering its formal quirks and lags—documenting the so-called “amateur” nature of the medium and an unselfconscious phase of filmmaking practice.
(E.H.)

A fragile Super 8 self-portrait rediscovered on 35 mm, made by a struggling nineteen year old discontented with the pseudo-Brakhagean spectacle presented by her fellow students at the end of the 1970’s. I shot with remote control and intercut magnetic striped passages of black to record my quandary. The paradoxical predicament of being both subject and object in myself resulted in a film that represents a perhaps obligatory phase of cinematic narcissism in the early work of an aspiring avant-garde filmmaker.
(E.H.)

The stars are going haywire. A vision of heavenly bodies in wild disarray recurs in Eve Heller’s Creme 21. Assembled out of found moving images procured from old features and educational movies, Heller’s film begins and ends with a tunnel vision of outer space. From the suspended state of an astronaut we return to earth, fleeting shadows animate rooms, a slime-covered man is raised to his feet. Two eyes open hesitantly; we see how they begin to see. After the silent black and white prologue, sound and color are tuned in. Brief fragments of music and spoken commentary are strung together in the form of a cut-up, accompanied by the soft audio clicks of close to a thousand tape-spliced edit points—a symphony of shattered sentences and synthetic/exotic sound collages.

The performance consists of live improvised music, videos, audio tapes and prepared electronic tapes and texts.

While at National Film Board of Canada (NFBC), In-tae Kim produced Korean Alphabet, an educational film designed to teach the Korean alphabet with a soundtrack created by Norman McLaren. Through this work (which received the Golden Prize for Educational Films at the Tehran International Film Festival in 1968), we can get an impression of the scope of cinema in Korea during the 1960s, and glimpse how new technologies and experimental techniques were used to explore cinematic concepts, in this case within a pedagogical setting.

Taking the basic structure of film, that consists of 24 frames per second, The Meaning of 1/24 Second expresses the harsh reality faced by modern humanity and the sense of alienation that comes from uncontrollable speed. Duration was a key concept in Kim’s artistic journey and the cinematic shape of this film was based on editing every second image. Unable to make a finished film print at that time due to technological limitations, Kim was so worried about the fragile nature of the print, given its many splices, that he prepared many additional elements for the premiere, including dancers and multiple slide projectors. These elements turned the film premiere into a multi-projection performance. The event was held at the Academy Music Hall in Seoul on 16 July 1969. This artistic gesture is considered to be one of the first non-normative cinematic interventions in Korean moving image history.

From 1975 to 1979, Lee presented about 50 “events” in different locations and exhibitions, although documentation of Lee’s performances is extremely rare. Identical Extent and Indoor Measurement were originally presented as part of Today’s Method group exhibition at the Identical Extent and Indoor Measurement White Deer Gallery in April 1975, while Rope and Two Peoples (originally titled as Meeting) were first presented as part of An Event by Four Artists at the Seoul Gallery in April 1976.

One can determine a line in Tscherkassky’s oeuvre which turns around a game with filmic presentation, with degrees of recognizability—with the only-just and the not-any-more. Just to see desire. An example of this is Erotique. One sees swirling pictures, parts of a woman’s face, red lips, eyes in cyclical fragments of movement. Often it is difficult to tell which part of the body one actually sees (whoever wants to can see/imagine/think sexual organs and sexual acts). The gaze gets hung up on partial objects, no integral, whole body to think about. No body, whose representation was always one of the problems in cinema. (Michael Palm)

Urlaubsfilm juggles with closeness, distance and the successive removal of the object on show. A woman on a meadow, strolling around, narcissistically involved, wandering. Now and again one can see her breasts through her half-opened shirt. The camera films with a powerful telephoto lens. This idyll is radically destroyed when the woman suddenly looks directly into the camera. There is an immediate cut (the voyeur has been discovered) and the whole sequence of events begins from the beginning again, but each time re-filmed from the last till, finally, only a completely abstract, flickering picture remains. The erotic view becomes increasingly memory.
(Michael Palm)

The target of tabula rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze. (Gabrielle Jutz)

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the “to the left, to the right, back and forth” grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

L’Arrivée is Tscherkassky’s second homage to the Lumière brothers. First you see the arrival of the film itself, which shows the arrival of a train at a station. But that train collides with a second train, causing a violent crash, which leads us to an unexpected third arrival, the arrival of a beautiful woman—the happy end. Reduced to two minutes L’Arrivée gives a brief, but exact summary of what cinematography (after its arrival with the Lumières’ train) has made into an enduring presence of our visual environment: violence, emotions. Or, as an anonymous American housewife (cited by T.W. Adorno) used to describe Hollywood’s version of life: “Getting into trouble and out of it again.”
(Peter Tscherkassky)

A woman, terrorized by an invisible and aggressive force, is also exposed to the audience’s gaze, a prisoner in two senses. Outer Space agitates this construction, which is prototypical for gender hierarchies and classic cinema’s viewing regime, and allows the protagonist to turn them upside down. … Flickering images, everything crashes, explodes; perforations and the soundtrack are engaged in a violent struggle. … The story ends in the woman’s resistant gaze.
(Isabella Reichert)

A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography. Dream Work is—after L’Arrivée and Outer Space—the third section of my CinemaScope Trilogy. The formal element binding the trilogy is the specific technique of contact printing, by which found film footage is copied by hand and frame by frame onto unexposed film stock. Through this, I am able, in a literal sense, to realize the central mechanism by which dreams produce meaning, the “dream work,” as Sigmund Freud described it: displacement and condensation. The new interpretation of the text of the original source material takes place through its “displacement” from its original context and its concurrent “condensation” by means of multiple exposure.
(Peter Tscherkassky)

The Exquisite Corpus commences with a search along a seashore. Eventually, the object of the search is discovered: a sleeping beauty lies on the beach, before our very eyes. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, we are drawn into her dream. It’s a highly ambiguous dream—sensuous, humorous, gruesome, erotic, and ecstatic—a broadly defined seduction lusting for a tangible, perceptible, exquisite physicality—including the body of the film.
(Peter Tscherkassky)

A phonographic album of sound effects (133 Authentic Sound Effects, Elektra Records) provides the basis and the structure of the film: the order and thematic groupings of the sounds are respected as found in the album. The images were obtained from film waste from different backgrounds: commercial films of different genres, amateur movies, home movies, advertising, industrial, tourism, etc.

This film is based upon the form of an individual’s diary. I created new images using several chemical treatments on the film surface, multi-printing, etc., utilizing footage of daily life recorded on film. This serial works were begun from trials that I had communicated seeking to re-construct my own memories, memories deeply connected with memory on film and with the film itself. The film is a conversation with personal documentary and everyday practice at darkroom.

The Dark Room is homage to a 16th-century apparatus, camera obscura. I tried to create a uniquely cinematic sensory experience. The views of Pacific Ocean could provide the powerful sense of moving water as mass and volume.

Moving painting #7: to reach coexistent points where abstraction and concreteness are equally fused.

This video is inspired by the phrase “Two omens: bamboo blossom and the morning star” (4.3 Speaks, vol. 4, pp. 341–342). Rather than deliver the mere historical factuality of Jeju uprising on April 3, 1948, my intention is to generate, with a minimum of information through images and sounds, a situation of sympathy with human existence and its emotions, as it helplessly faces historical tragedy, In Sung Si, I wanted to depict situations at that time where happiness and safety were suddenly removed and anxiety and fear took control, and the desperation of survivors, whose lives could only to be lived through “praying hearts” and forbidden mourning. Sung Si means disaster and omen in Jeju dialect.

The images of this film are taken from propaganda films produced by the Korean government over the past 60 or so years, and most of the sounds in the film are taken from these films and the audio-visual teaching aid The Anti-communist Case of the Anti-communist Child Lee Seung-bok, which was produced separately by the Ministry of Education and Culture. This audiovisual aid consists of a slide film and a cassette tape, and the high-pitched sound of the cassette tape is synced over the film.

Europa is an experimental video that depicts poetic encounters between the seen and unseen, between delicate details and expansive spaces. Enveloped in pure colors, elusive existence and frigid weather events, an imaginary landscape resonates with the constant state of perceptual ambiguity. Through the accumulation of time, the imagery creates a threshold between reality and imagination.

In this video, Cho transforms the sea shore into a visual poem. His inner landscapes and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation about space and place, light, time and traveling. The video consists of heavily distorted electronic images which result in mainly horizontal lines and color bars which are reminiscent of the horizontal lines of VHS video.

Fragments from the novel of the same name by Vladimir Sorokin about the shortages of food and goods in the middle of the 1980 are on loop. This “Tibetan Book of Death” about people trapped in an endless cycle of consumption. The stream of options within the collective mind of the doomed artist is like a march with elements of tango. Here, it is not actually desirable, but real and unstable. Queue by Sasha Pirogova is a loop without the possibility of a meaningful exit and break. This work uses real items from the 1980s which were purchased in our time. We are free to watch in Queue the critique of the society of consumption and the metaphor of the collective martyrdom where regular items become symbols of desire.

The convention of conditional audibility and an intelligible image is called into question by features of its structure: although the audience watches the video, it is hard to come to a single unifying conclusion. Videos of the Blue Soup show us both the accident and the loop in a pure form to represent it as a realization of scenario unit outside of a narrative. Instead of physical restrictions of plane and matter, as well as defying conventions of modernism, Blue Soup works with time, exempting it from the dictatorship of the narrator. Illusion stops being an illusion (Valentin Dyakonov).

The metaphysical story, which has happened at a concert, forms an outline of the film. The young people who have come to the early music concert, instead of taking pleasure from instrument fine sounding, have to struggle with a wind forced by the organ into the music hall. The air streams subjected to musical impulses, run into a listener in spite of his will. Voices are not audible, but they sometimes break through noise of the wind and music. Force of an air influence gives compound psychophysical experiences. Something tries to establish a certain transcendental dialogue, which sets in for a moment, but then disappears. At one time the wind, accompanied by low monotonous organ noise, brings motionless sitting people to certain unconsciousness, to mad activity: fight is started at the concert.

This film consists of a monologue delivered by the heroine from her personal experiences, which depicts her confronting the condemnation of Russia’s socialist past and musing on the socialism that is yet to come. Thanks to the techniques of surrealism, the minimalist interior of the photographic laboratory, and the abrupt montage, the viewer sees everything in a dream sequence. A clearly structured narrative fails to hold its own against the positive pressure of the social utopia and crumbles into petty domestic anecdotes, deepening the general unease at the current state of affairs, as wishful thinking gives birth to that which never was (Vera Trakhtenberg, Andrey Parshikov).

The video is made of footage recorded from February to April 2014 and explores recent political events: the earliest protests against the war in Ukraine, the Bolotnaya Square case trials, and the time preceding the economic crisis. The work reflects moments of anxiety and uncertainty about the near future, with semi-documentary footage of everyday life reminiscent of hopes that have been indefinitely suspended. Courbet’s Funeral is a collage, blending video poetry with documentation, fiction, reality and politics while creating complex associations rooted in personal and national histories. The film has preserved the tension and the confusion of this era which gets dissolved in the pink lighting of the final party scene to a soundtrack by Motherfathers.

Overgrown ponds, concrete fences, sandy beaches and swamps in ooze in Moscow area—not only the organic environment where the artist lives and has grown, but also a metaphor of the wild reserve of modern Russia which inhabitants have lost faith in wonderful things long ago. Roman Mokrov in Paradise, To Set Off and Homewards, on the contrary, builds on the basis of everyday pictures the fantastic worlds that cross collective unconscious, national household culture, national habits and media images. In works from “the Pastoral” series, the artist resorts to industrial film special effects or creates heroes who supplement silent natural landscapes and recover empty spaces where the look of the observer doesn’t find anything surprising.

Overgrown ponds, concrete fences, sandy beaches and swamps in ooze in Moscow area—not only the organic environment where the artist lives and has grown, but also a metaphor of the wild reserve of modern Russia which inhabitants have lost faith in wonderful things long ago. Roman Mokrov in Paradise, To Set Off and Homewards, on the contrary, builds on the basis of everyday pictures the fantastic worlds that cross collective unconscious, national household culture, national habits and media images. In works from “the Pastoral” series, the artist resorts to industrial film special effects or creates heroes who supplement silent natural landscapes and recover empty spaces where the look of the observer doesn’t find anything surprising.

Overgrown ponds, concrete fences, sandy beaches and swamps in ooze in Moscow area—not only the organic environment where the artist lives and has grown, but also a metaphor of the wild reserve of modern Russia which inhabitants have lost faith in wonderful things long ago. Roman Mokrov in Paradise, To Set Off and Homewards, on the contrary, builds on the basis of everyday pictures the fantastic worlds that cross collective unconscious, national household culture, national habits and media images. In works from “the Pastoral” series, the artist resorts to industrial film special effects or creates heroes who supplement silent natural landscapes and recover empty spaces where the look of the observer doesn’t find anything surprising.

A blow, a feeling of pain, exposed nerves, fear, seething and straining inside. Unlimited anxiety is stored up and in time it will burst out, crushing everything in its way. You lose your footing. The traumatic experience stays forever in your memory. Raw scars remain upon the cloth of your life.