Matters Of Time

A Cuban home as a non-place reflected in artefacts accessed through recollections, materials and textures. A delicate film poem is a collection of aberrations of the utmost intimate memory with scenes and activities referring to building, deconstruction, places and events that create associative reflections on the meaning of the term “home”.  “Starting from the portrait as a support and exploring its expressive possibilities, I enter into the reconstruction of beings and spaces that I have never known or visited.“ A. Alonso Estrella

Motorcycles and cars are lost in the sound of traffic and disappear in bands sliced into film footage of Jakarta’s roads. The horizontal and vertical lines or checkerboard patterns emphasizing the density and chaos of the crowded roads were made by optically printing 16mm film. “Jakarta’s bikes are gloriously arresting. Unified into a flow and yet jerky and autonomous, like a visual ‘gamelan’ of motion, a disparate yet concordant ensemble. I tried to get close to its inherent musicality.” R. Tuohy

Contemporary and archival footage of the Berkeley Pit, an open pit copper mine in Montana – today filled with contaminated water – is chemically altered using poisonous substances from this water containing copper, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid in order to call attention to the destructive consequences of mining. “The film shows the destructive consequences of mine waste through a variety of photochemical processes using the same contaminants found in the water of the pit.“ J. Gerlach

After spending two years studying and collecting images created using various wet development processes for 16mm film, Wang explores the visual forms of material fluidity in order to celebrate invisible micro- and macrostructures whose chimeras are laid bare in moving patterns.   "I am often inspired by the beauty of errors produced in analogue film production and use unwanted analogue visual noise and patterns, such as dust or watermarks to create imaginary cinematic landscapes." N. Wang

A pensive analysis of the vision and perception apparatus shared by all two-eyed beings gazes far ahead and in an intriguing perception experiment, explores the imagination of the depth of field and the illusory consistency of the image while dissecting the routine perspective on objects, shapes, motion and the phenomena around us."This is a dance between your brain and the world. We are bathed in interferences from sensual data to what might be out there. We will go to another land, we will try another sea. One plus one equals three." R. Kohlberger

In high-contrast black-and-white images of nature and mountain villages, the filmmaker meditates on family origins and identity while traveling across the Andes along the same route taken in 1925 by her Jewish grandfather (a professional boxer originally from Romania) in order to acquire Peruvian citizenship, which 12 years later allowed him and his family to leave Europe. Peru native Madi Piller (1960) lives in Canada, where she works as an independent filmmaker, animator, and programmer and curator for the Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS). Her abstract poetic films combine various cinematic styles and techniques and explore themes of memory, introspection, and the search for cultural identity.“Delving into memory and reflecting on territorial space, the film revisits a passage in life. By using 16mm high contrast film and by processing the silver essence of the film material resurfaced as a layer such as the hidden treasures of the Andes.”

A surface rhythmised by reappearing image segments of a forest, gets projects during a walk, brought about also by the sound, into a space in which black-and-white and colour footage reveals monochromatic parts. These build up to create an effect of the third dimension, pulling our view into the depth and turning the ingenious schedule of the whole into a cognitive game using 3D representation."Below is not so much about borne suffering or the history of a memorial place. It tells more about the relation of depth-time and space-duration being interwoven in every moment of an image. " B. Spiegel

An anthology of rituals, masks, skin paintings, and other decorations, captured from up close in Ile-Ife, the legendary holy city of the Yoruba, who live primarily in southwestern Nigeria but also in some parts of Latin America and who consider the god Obatala to be the creator of Earth and of human bodies.  "I understand my cinematic practice as an inquiry into modes of experience and as a gesture of channeling. One of them could be the state of devotion and possession by spiritual and cosmic forces. " S. Wiedemann  

Desire without its object is like an image made unrecognizable by cutting out its parts; by scratching away part of the visible image, the image becomes a hole sliced into a pained body, fumbling about for what is missing, seeking physical contact and tangible proof of co-existence.  ""Exhumation" is my interpretation of the reports of Dali's death mask recently. I worked to physically peel back layers of representation to reveal disintegrated memories of figures that once were." D. McIntyre  

An exploration of the place, plants, stones, and buildings in a village located in a rocky bay in northeastern Catalonia near the French border, where Walter Benjamin died and is buried. A tactile encounter with a place, made using a prototype haptic camera that records the objects its user touches from unexpected perspectives. Agata Mergler is a postgraduate student of the humanities at Canada’s University of York, where she is involved in developing apparatus that record what their users touch. Cristian Villavicencio Ruiz (1984) is from Ecuador and is studying at the University of the Basque Country in Leioa. His work explores the relationship between tangible and visible perception and how it changes during the digital transfer of stimuli using modern technologies.“In our collaborative work using DIY digital prototype ‘haptic cameras’ provides us with opportunity to question the hegemony of the visual and the role of touch in moving image production.”

This essayist collage visually develops French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of nonplace (ephemeral places characterized by anonymity or blurred identity) and turns images of highways and rest stops upside down, thus emphasizing the difficult-to-grasp images of these worlds “Marc Augé’s essay (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) meets with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in some Hungarian highway rest areas.”

This remake of Man Ray’s celebrated Emak Bakia (1926), which uses a cameraless method of creating hand-processed film images in high-contrast black-and-white, refers to the original film even in its subject matter as well: continuing with the motifs of death, it works with artifacts and documents from US drone attacks on Pakistani territory in 2015. Kathryn Ramey (1967) is an American filmmaker, anthropologist, and teacher at Emerson College in Boston. Through celluloid manipulation and hand developing film stock, she creates new audiovisual forms that search for points of intersection between anthropological studies and experimental film. Her works have received numerous awards at international festivals.“Combining experimental process - es with theoretical premises and anthropolo gy, my films and installations seek to deconsecrate the ‘real’ of conventional documentary and agitate the viewer to seek out subjugated narratives in dominant media culture.”