A flicker film made with images taken in Malawi.
FF was in response to an assignment given by artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson who created the soundtrack to which they invited artists to make a “Future Film”.
Claire is composed of digital scans and blow-ups of a series of three ink-on-paper artworks created in 2012 by French-Spanish researcher, publisher and artist Claire Latxague. While collecting drawings, written documents and other printed materials for a (yet unreleased) project called Un film de papier, I’ve stumbled upon Latxague’s artwork, entitled À la renverse. The blow-ups were made in an attempt of unearthing cartographic imagery in abstract compositions.
A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in an infinite fall through a mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom.
A young pilot narrowly escapes the destruction of her home in a stolen ship, only to be followed by the colossal cockroach responsible.
An exploration of Rodez Cathedral and its stained glass windows: praying figures and scientific imagery. A study on color, repetition and flickering consisting of 292 photographs.
A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. An entry in an ongoing video and film series, Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.
Lying quietly in a cine-camera, a film awaits to fulfill its responsibility of projecting 24 frames of images per second after exposure. Nonetheless, I prefer rolling out films outright and fiddling with them by pigments application, collage, scratch, cut-and-mix, etc. Since these are camera-less measures, the projection is unpredictable, surprising, and often so astonishing that I would be mesmerized.
Sunday afternoon. Images of last summer. A view of the sunset from a hill. Some flashes.
Detoxify oneself from accumulate images, being able to see again as after an electroshock. ἐκπύρωσις, ekpýrosis, “out of the fire”, in Greek philosophy is the universal conflagration or “great fire and end of the world”.
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces.
The arrieros hold the lamb's body with their hands. The knife cuts the animal's throat and blood cascades out.
An afternoon in the woods. Every camera movement a stroke of a brush. An impossible painting. Never completing itself, always starting anew.
This film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is filtered. The animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to hide them from predators, ironically now make the animals more visible to human predators who are attracted by their exotic uniqueness. This cinematic analogy underscores modern humanity's relationship to the natural world.