read —
curated programs
Nida, 2024, 30th July 2024
Suspaustas Laikas ‘24 Experimental Film and Arts Festival
This program is curated by Vilnius-based cine-artist Miklós (Miki) Ambrózy.
Ecopoetics II
The Ritual Called DwellingThe concept of ecology is derived from the Greek root “oikos” - household.
An ecopoetics of film expands our senses to include other-than-human
dwellings, beyond material and form. Through the creative use of gesture,
scale, repetition, cultural technique and chance, this program is a reminder of the need for experimental arts. A timely call when ecology and
experimental are terms which have become overused to the point of
becoming empty of meaning.
We often hear the argument that language is what keeps humans apart from other life forms, alongside the complexity of human consciousness. These two have provided us with power to alter place and matter. Yet, as it is becoming increasingly clear, the environment forms us as much as we form it, if not more. The material processes in the films presented here are
wide-ranging: from breast milk to the Bolex camera, from montage to
musical harmonies, we create forms of life we then call films, only to
release them into the pools of culture. Re-combining happens between the
body, a place, chance, time and the apparatus of cinema.
The act of projection is the moment of gathering for us, humans. It is a
fundamentally social act which makes sense to us only. And while we’re
watching these instances of light and darkness, the “material processes
—some organic and biological, and some not—that give rise to particular
forms of life” continue to move, surface, and emerge “at different speeds,
with different effects.” Experimental ecopoetics is an invitation to embrace
more things at once: the inhuman pace of evolutionary mutation as well as
the “dynamics of learning and communication that rewire the
neurophysiological plasticity of particular kinds of organisms." (Carry Wolfe)
An ecopoetics of film takes the parameters of cinema and reinvents them as material processes, not as techniques to produce effects, but as an inquiry into life itself.
Film stills courtesy of Light Cone, Paris.
Program Notes
Part 1
Screened from 16mm prints
Shedding by Vicky SMITH
2024 / 16mm / b&w / mute / 1S / 4' 00
A performance for the Bolex camera in which dimensions of stasis and movement are physically enacted by filming at varying frame rates. A still figure, saturated with light, appears to be highly overexposed. As layers of the image dislodge and peel away it becomes apparent that the exposure is correct, and that actually the brightness is caused through repeated multiple superimpositions.
…These Blazeing Starrs! by Deborah STRATMAN
2011 / 16mm / b&w / sound / 1S / 14' 14
Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. Music by Disinformation, John Duncan & Max Springer,
Ryoji Ikeda, L.O.S.D., Pan Sonic, S.E.T.I.
Covert Action by Abigail Child
1984 / 16mm / n&b / sonore / 1E / 10' 00
I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social and remake those gestures into a dance that would front their conditioning, and as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the "facts" forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story-like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive.
Part 2
Screened digitally
The Future is Behind You by Abigail Child,
2004, b&w, sound, 18’ 40
THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930’s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. At once biography & fiction, history & psychology, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU excavates gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private & public histories. Music by John Zorn, arranged and played by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman.
The Demands of Ordinary Devotion, Eva Giolo
2022 / 16mm / color / sound / 1S / 12' 06
A film constructed based on a game of chance and a collection of encounters in workshops and homes in the city of Rome. Although the protagonists never appear together, they are inextricably bound by their actions – meaning is conveyed through movement and its associated sound, slowly forming a visual exploration of physicality. THE DEMANDS OF ORDINARY DEVOTION invites a reflection on the process of making, the prospect of motherhood, and uncertainties in creation, balance and composition.