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curated programs
Nida, 2024, 31st July 2024
Suspaustas Laikas ‘24 Experimental Film and Arts Festival
This program is curated by Vilnius-based cine-artist Miklós (Miki) Ambrózy and filmmaker Miglė Križinauskaitė (LT)
e l e m e n t a l
an evening with Why Cut When You Can Fade?We start from a mode of making films called "experimental". A loaded term taken up by many without much attention to the values within. Artistic experiments with moving images are part of a multi-modal discourse, where boundaries and contexts are fluid. This can provoke "disciplining" from the side of tradition and convention, or an affirmative embrace from transdisciplinary artists.
Which way do we go, as creators, and why? What kind of experience or argument does the spectator end up with in different configurations?
Photography courtesy of Tomas Terekas (c)This year’s session is designed to start a conversation around the works in progress of two artists, Miglė Križinauskaitė and Miklós Ambrózy, who are both invested in cinema through diverse modes of making films and hybrid performances. By opening up their works-in-progress, these artists invite you to join the process of making itself. Breaking with the heteronormative assumptions of the artist as hero, the audience is invited to shape new works in a moment of vulnerability and social insight.
Program Notes
Miglė Križinauskaitė:
Does the Sea Have a Heart?
Work in Progress | Super 8 mm | Color | Single Screen | Sound | 10’
This film is a poetic essay, an ode to the sea. Although it does not place a human being at its center, it is precisely the absence of a human that best reveals the essence of humanity. As poet Kahlil Gibran said, 'There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.'
Ar jūra turi širdį? (rež. Miglė Križinauskaitė)
Ši kino juosta – tai poetinė esė, odė jūrai, kurios centre gal ir nėra žmogaus, bet kaip tik jo nebuvimas geriausiai ir atskleidžia žmogiškumo esmę. Poeto Kahlil Gibran žodžiais tariant, druskoje turi būti kažkas itin sakralaus, nes jos yra ir mūsų ašarose, ir jūroje.
Miki Ambrózy, the oracle (Caroline Daish, Justine Maxelon), and others:
A Field Holding Ithaka
Work in Progress | live sound with stick, stone and sand | Color and BW | 16mm projection and digital transfer | 18’
Presentation of the research project “seeds of degrowth” - an encounter with the oracle
In this performance, we invite you to respond to the landscape, through acts of attentiveness. What is left of a cinematic piece, if we leave aside some of our deeply ingrained distinctions: human and nature, mind and body, theory and action, figure and ground, subject and object, sound and image, representation and experience, reason and intuition? Beyond these dualities, maybe we discover new forms, a language more attuned to life here and now. How can we attend to this landscape? Starting from a loop, a drone, and the voicing of the oracle, we begin….
Seeds of Degrowth
In this series, the artist collaborates with different entities, human and other, to degrow his own practice of analogue cinema. What is a post-industrial cinema? What is the ecological, when the term has been completely emptied of all meaning? What is the place of authorship in an ongoing work based on an ethics of care?
Without sampling, there is no soil. Without film stock, there's no reality.
Life is restless and inarticulate - offering a new definition of intelligence. Using film, video, microbes and so on, we attempt to feel the dynamic genius of life forms as they are evolving. Life forms are un-doing, de-growing and returning to matter. The human is waiting. We are merely witnessing life, but we cannot speak its language: the language of sea, soil, and cloud. All that we're capable of are cultural techniques. Sampling, exposing, gathering, layering, cultivating, voicing, spelling. Soil and film enable worlds that are unstable. Can the artist and the scientist accept instability?
Photography courtesy of Tomas Terekas (c)