Fascinations

The drama of the ants’ life unfolds in memory traces shaped by phantom light as a remnant of brief images in flashbacks following the folding and twisting into phantasmal positions of the ants’ segmented bodies inside their safe shelters.

The impression of the work of philosopher Rudolf Arnheim, woven into a desktop collage, is based on a visit to Disneyland, an iconic cultural product reflected in Arnheim’s texts, photographs, and audio compositions, with a central consideration of the ways in which film distances itself from reality or the impression of realism.

The dreamy memory of the ubiquitous bicycles in Beijing is a playful material for decomposing the image on the basis of colour affinity, creating surfaces with carefully calculated shade ratios in the gaps between the movement of the bicycles in heavy traffic.

Made directly on film stock without the use of a camera, hand-developed and optically copied using classical techniques, the images create the appearance of natural structures and flying creatures with immersive foley effects.

A contemplative collection of images of the Yukon Territory, an area of north-western Canada where parts of native wilderness are still preserved. Through historical artifacts and contemporary realities, the film constructs imprints of collective memory against the backdrop of pristine tundra.

The documentation of the river focuses on a set of rounded stones whose moving contours, flowing around invisible obstacles and pouring out of thin lines into changing surfaces, have been constructed from thousands of photographs using 3D graphics techniques.

Trees and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer’s memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows.

The layered essayistic reflection on migration, or more precisely on the constant movement towards the unknown as a cultural and instinctive necessity, intersperses archival footage with symbolic scenes, associative images thematizing religious affiliation, and documentations of contemporary events on the borders of continents.

The directness of the idea of synchronous perception of forward and backward movement creates a mental space for reflection on areas or phases of life where, despite the combination of different dynamics, the irreversible result is the impression of remaining in one place.

The consistently catalogued archive of photographs creates a taxonomy of shapes and colours that emerges in geometric arrangements and the pulsating rhythm of the dramatic movement of the architecture of context. With his traditional visual approach, the director dismantles and reassembles the idea of functionalist housing in this work. 

A rhythmic ballad highlighting the cycle of work tasks and also the curtsies of time passing in systems of time-proven gestures and procedures, with the compositional force being the desire to follow the decomposition by reassembling a new texture.

A film recording of a window – one of the iconic objects of the diary pictures of the pandemic era – created with traditional in-camera tricks. Here, the frame within a frame is a reflection of the geometry of the image, drawing the attention of the viewer situated in the middle of the interior from which the camera tries to gaze out.

A contemplative, intimately associative exploration of the relationship between the director, a pioneer of video art; Yuan-chia (1929–1994), a Chinese artist and founder of the LYC Museum in Northern England; and Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001), a renowned musician and electronic music composer, which also results in a collaboration – with audio artist Caro C.   

The replication of the proven techniques of the film avant-garde fills the image with natural lyricism; with the traditional multiple-exposure method of structural films, fragments of various flora are illuminated and hidden again by being submerged into the stock.

The expressive dance and the land-art gesture on a desolate island rock draws a suggestive allusion to an iconic figure of Brazilian performance art – Luz del Fuego, a ballerina and striptease dancer performing with live snakes who was murdered on the island.

In the lyrical composition, natural artefacts evoke the practices of the traditional film avant-garde where nature is structurally connected with fragments and folds of the human body, while a third structure, the unevenness on the surface of the film stock, comes into the play.

The spellbinding time-lapse follows the director’s daughter in a circularly minimalist depiction of the cycle of changes in her face from childhood to adulthood. 

The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers’ collections which was shot around 1900 in London, restored, and coloured by artificial intelligence. It also offers a reflection on the regimes of power in which the filming apparatus seizes control over the observed reality. 

The mythological space of the storm creates an area for poetic reflection on natural movements and cultural cycles, developed through children’s narratives and fabrications of future events. 

Closed New Zealand’s freezing plants have become ruins with wildlife growing through them. Once they were used by the country’s dominant industry processing livestock into meat and other products, but the industry has been in decline since Britain joined the EEC. Animation permeates the documentary film, with workers arising from archive footages.

In 1998, the director’s mother came to the Tiber River, waited until dawn, and then the water took her forever. The suggestive memory carries the audience through a tranquil voyage, allowing them to observe the riverbank during the day, at night and at dawn, with the mother’s face at the centre of the passing image throughout.

The essay perceives algorithms as a “living” species and gives them the space to co-create their own space, evoking reflections on naturalness and artificiality, the nature of habitus, and the border between fiction and documentation, in the scenery of a lyrical film shot within the computer games Grand Theft Auto 5 and theHunter: Call of the Wild.

The iconic image of rails as a sign of movement and moving, industrialization and accelerating mobility creates a hypnotic time-lapse portrait of eleven miles of almost interchangeable urban and suburban landscapes and their nooks and crannies.

Introspective films processing both found and archival personal materials became almost a subgenre of their own during the pandemic lock-down. The sensitive diary collage focuses on exploratory attempts to retrace the path to one’s own identity.