w o m e n SOFIE REDFERN SARAH CROFTS ANNIK GAUDET PAULINA RUTMAN JULIA THOMPSON CAROLINA JONSSON ROOSJE VERSCHOOR ANGELINA VOSKOPOULOU MADELEINE CO ART COLLECTIVE KRISTIN RIKHARDSDOTTIR
INDEPENDENT
WOMEN’S CINEMA
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Contents 04 Kristin Rikhardsdottir
130 Julia Thompson
IN IT - to win it
It was our little paradise
26
152
Madeleine Co art collective
Paulina Rutman
Listen to the Chorus
FALL
50
170
Angelina Voskopoulou
Annik Gaudet
76
194
Roosje Verschoor
Sarah Crofts
Skin deep - an hymn to Eros
Woodland
The Weather Forecast
Spyglass
96
218
Carolina Jonsson
Sofie Redfern
Painting of Ecolonia #12
Dead Air
Women Cinemakers meets
Kristin Rikhardsdottir Lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland
Kristin Helga Rikhardsdottir is an Icelandic visual artist, filmmaker and summertime park ranger currently living and working in Reykjavik. Using video, installations, photography and sound performances she explores the hyper-reality of everyday environment. She takes inspiration from her surroundings and works with society as an insider, a full participant and player. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in Iceland, as well as Sweden, the Czech Republic and Colombia. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Icelandic Academy of the Arts.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
is a captivating experimental video by ReykjavĂk based multidisciplinary artist Kristin Rikhardsdottir: addressing the viewers to inquire into the notion of human communications, her work delivers a complex and nuanced take on our media driven contemporary age, to encourage crosspollination of the spectatorship. One of the most interesting aspects of Rikhardsdottir's work is the way it urges the spectatorship to
explore the hyper-reality of everyday environment and we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Kristin and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a B.A. in Fine Arts, that yu received from the Icelandic Academy of the Arts: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does
Courtesy of The Living Art Museum, photographs by VigfĂşs Birgisson
Women Cinemakers your work as a summertime park ranger direct the trajectory of your artistic research? The program at is very open and students are encouraged to go their own ways through the program. Doing my BA in a program like that helped me shape my practice in the way I wanted. Mainly by doing experiments (some failed ones) and getting feedback from teachers and other students. When I work I am influenced by my surroundings and mundane experiences which was no exception when working in as a park ranger. Since in my practice I like to explore the man-made I became interested in the marketing of nature and how natural phenomenas can very easily be turned into a product. After simultaneously being in nature in the mekka of tourism and being from Reykjavik (the capital of hotels and giftstores) I came up with a new project which I called “If you can’t beat them – join them” which is exhibited at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik at the moment. In this work I recreate an obsidian, a precious stone found at Hrafntinnusker (translates to “Obsidian Mountain”) which is located in the
nature reserve I work in. I produced a new type of obsidian as a commodity which I market and sell in tourist shops. I call the sculptures OBBSIDIAN©. They are made from basalt, which once was a solid part of Reykjavik’s base rock but was blown up to make space for new buildings. I polished them with an angle grinder before varnishing them and lacquered in layers. The basalts new personality has a smooth uniform texture that breaks with a conchoidal fracture, looking like a real obsidian. You are a versatile artist and your pratice is marked out with such stimulating multidisciplinary feature, that allows you to range from video and installations to photography and sound performances: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to in order visit to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme? I want to be multidisciplinary because I think its fun. I never get bored of my practice. I am not
Courtesy of The Living Art Museum, photographs by VigfĂşs Birgisson
Courtesy of The Living Art Museum, photographs by Vigfús Birgisson
afraid of failure and I want to explore stuff that’s new to me and I’ve never done before. Experience which has led me to have a broad technical knowledge which has helped me. Even if I don’t know how to make a particular object or effect I will find out one way or the other. Worst case I am not afraid to simply ask for help. When I select a medium I often sketch out in my frequent go-to-mediums and try out
and see what I like and what fits the idea. So for one idea I create and sketch the idea in more mediums than I use. For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the
Courtesy of The Living Art Museum, photographs by VigfĂşs Birgisson
introductory pages of this article and whose teaser can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the themes of is the way it walks the viewers through such a multilayered experience. While walking our
readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? The initial idea was that I wanted to create a character which is (like everybody) the hero of his own life. Everybody is self centered because everybody’s life is about them. It just makes sense. I wanted to create a person who judges
others but on the same time is very anxious of its own judgment. Which I think many people can relate to. The protagonist is an object but is in some way more human than humans. Its dealing with things such as the line between compassion and ego, arrogance and having self esteem. Knowing that you should “believe in yourself” but secretly not believing. “Act until you are”. The best way to overcome social anxiety is to use a communication formula. The karaoke part came in very naturally and surprisingly. As I wrote the song I really couldn’t stop singing it. I was having a lot of fun and recorded it the karaoke came in. At the time I had and, also been thinking about doing an unrelated karaoke piece and was interested in karaoke’s connection to the audience. The research I had done for the unrelated project united with “IN IT – to win it” so soon it became the same project. is marked out with allegorical qualities: how much importance do metaphors play in your artistic practice? It plays a part but I think it comes naturally with all my work. I never make a masterplan of metaphors before I make a work. It comes with the process.
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Women Cinemakers
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Women Cinemakers We have highly appreciated the way isc apable of walking the viewers to the interstitial point where reality and imagination find consistent points of convergence: are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I want the audience to make their own associations connected to my works. I’m not interested in forcing the audience to understand my work. In a way I don’t think there is something to understand but rather something to sense or connect to yourself. I want the audience to have its own interpretation and connect to experiences they had. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, you take inspiration from your surroundings: how does everyday life's experience fuel your artistic research? I think it’s safe to say that every single work I ever did was influenced in some way by my everyday life and experiences. It just depends on where I got inspired by. For example, when I lived in Berlin I made this work called “Rosemary”. It’s a light box showing three images of a woman posing like the Virgin Mary, her
Women Cinemakers hands holding rosemary and finally her steaming her face. I had this idea looking at my flatmate religiously steaming her face to prevent a cold and for general health and beauty purposes. The sight of her steaming her face on her kitchen table every night became the beginning of this work. I can also say that I have the most ideas when looking in the mirror and brushing my teeth. I brush my teeth quite well and for a long time which gives me time to think about my day and what I did, saw and thought at the time. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once remarked that "
": as an artist particularly concerned with , what could be in your opinion the role of artists in our unstable, everchanging contemporary age? In particular, does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? The artist role in a contemporary society in a way is to reflect what is happening at the moment it is made. With that said I could say
that my cultural influences are these experiences that are mainly concerned with western society. For example commercials, pop culture, nature, society, structure and anxiety. Over the years your work has been featured in exhibitions in Iceland, as well as Sweden, the Czech Republic and Colombia, and was awarded as “Best Experimental” at West Virginia Mountaineer Festival.: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish with the viewers, who urged to from a condition of mere spectatorship. So we would like to ask you a question about the nature of the relationship with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception? And what do you hope to trigger in the spectatorship? I want to connect with the audience from within. I want to put together things the audience knows from its communications, visual environment and some social situation. I don’t want it to be forced but rather open to making a connection. I don’t have a hope to trigger but maybe to open up and rethink what you already know.
A still from
Women Cinemakers Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ' ', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on in this interdisciplinary field? I’ve never thought about myself to be an unconventional artist but rather other people to be too conventional. I definitely have been made aware that I am a women artist. Women in general have to work harder to prove their point and prove they are serious so I think that motivates me in being productive. I have a feeling that it’s a bit harder to be a female artist that works with satire and humor since women are typically not perceived as funny and unlikely to make slightly funny art. A lot of women around me are in some way doing interdisciplinary work so I feel very positive about the future of women in the field. It’s definitely not the easiest way - but the easy way is usually the boring way, anyway!
Women Cinemakers Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Kristin. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? For the last year I’ve been busy in constantly creating new work. In May and June, I finished important deadlines so I had decided to take a break and “relax” and give myself time to go over new ideas. I am now in the highlands in Iceland and will be here until the end of August. “If you can’t beat them – join them” is currently being shown at the exhibition “Pressure of the Deep” in the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik until the 13th of August. I have a performance scheduled for 4th of August in the Living Museum in relation to the work. The performance is still in a process. I am working on a script for a new film and having ideas about a new photograph series and I want to make music. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Women Cinemakers meets
Madeleine Co. art collective The public sphere is saturated and constantly abuzz with opinions on the state of women’s rights and their possible futures. "Listen to the Chorus" is an immersive video installation which explores the state of women's rights and a collective desire for change. An experimental composition combining poetry and music, "Listen to the Chorus" was developed from a series of conversations about women's experiences and hopes for the future. The piece seeks to amplify voices of those who identify as women and to present a chorus of resistance that implores the audience to listen.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier
Our focus with Madeleine Co. is to reimagine
and Dora S. Tennant
some of today’s most pressing social issues
womencinemaker@berlin.com
through experiential storytelling and multimedia art. It’s important to us to deal with subject
Hello Nicole, Alexandra and Cheryl and welcome
matter we find meaningful and use our collective
to
practice to make work that can change the world.
: before starting to
elaborate about your artistic production we
Our greatest influence and evolution as artists
invite our readers to visit
would be our unique style of collaboration, and in order to get a wide
the ways in which we’ve grown and shaped the
idea about your artistic productions. Are there
collective together.
any experiences that particularly influenced your
The three of us come from different creative
evolution as artists and creatives?
backgrounds, with different modes of working
Women Cinemakers from social practice, to film, to performance, photography, integrated media and design, and those varying perspectives have influenced our unique interest in producing conceptually rigorous, interdisciplinary works on a variety of subject matter. For this special edition of have selected
we , an extremely
interesting video installation that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at : we have appreciated the powerful combination of poetry and music and what has at once captured our attention of your insightful exploration of the state of women’s rights is the way you have provided the visual results of your analysis with such . While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell how did you develop its structure in order to achieve such powerful results? emerged from personal instances of abuse, harassment, and frustration we’ve experienced as women, and the motivation for its creation was catalyzed from a specific traumatic incident which
Women Cinemakers happened to one member of our collective. Our aim was to express and elevate the multiplicity of diverse voices within the women’s rights movement, to explore the anger, fear, and ultimately hope that we felt towards equality for all women. The development of
was a generative process,
designed around conversations that emerged from a dinner series where we invited women within our lives to share their perspectives and stories. From these conversations, we brought on two amazing collaborators, poet Nasim Asgari and composer Cecilia Livingston to work with us. The process was intensively collaborative and we’re equally proud of the resulting piece and the enriching experience of making it. It's no doubt that collaborations as the one that you have established together are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your work? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines?
Women Cinemakers
Conceptually we work across mediums in an interdisciplinary fashion and we agree that it’s
his mode has allowed us to work ambitiously,
certainly one of our strengths. The collaborative
producing projects such as the comedy art series
nature of work is grounded on collectively
and the climate change
exploring an idea or concept that we feel
documentary series
passionate about and bringing on fellow artists
collective, everything we do is highly tenuous to
and creators who share our vision and who can
negotiation and dialogue. In the act of speaking,
elevate the work. T
listening, asking, there is a desire to combine our
. Within the
Women Cinemakers
unique perspectives, backgrounds, experiences
the project itself highlights the multiplicity of
and capabilities towards producing compelling
voices and fluctuating interpretations. This also
work that’s strengthened by our combined
presents the creative challenge of being open to
talents. We often speak about the importance of
the complexity of the subject matter we explore,
generosity in our method of collaboration. In
but also being aware of the necessity of
that way our work and our collaborations, both
presenting our final work with a clear and focused
within the collective and outside is an act of
direction.
coming together to create a singular project - but
Women Cinemakers
Especially with
we were
work, how a collective voice can emerge without
interested in exploring how the multiple could exist
completely eradicating the voice of the individual.
within the singular -- how can a movement such as
When exploring the state of women's rights, also addresses the viewers
the women’s rights movement foster a collected desire for change amid different voices and possible
to inquire into : do you think that Contemporary Art
interpretations of urgency. The piece demonstrates
could be an effective drive for social change? In
through the process of creation and in the final
particular, do you think that your being a
Women Cinemakers
woman provides your artistic research with some
perspectives.
? We have a story to tell, within the context in which we live and who we are - in terms of identifying as
Art can be a trojan horse - an unexpected way into the depths of an issue. The work of art can provide a
women as bringing value to our practice, we think it
slight alteration in perspective of a concept, outside
adds authenticity because we have something to
the realm of the usual and expected. Within the
say based on our lived experiences, and our desired
domain of art, there exists the possibility to explore
impact is to create work that speaks truth to those
and experience something new.
Women Cinemakers We have appreciated the balanced combination between analytical approach to gestures and sense of spontaneity in your work: British artist Chris Ofili once stated that " ". How would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a body of work and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does improvisation play in your process? Our work, through our process, often creates spaces for the unexpected and improvisational, in that we never set out with a specific idea of what a work is meant to say. In
we relied heavily
on the dialogue that emerged out of the dinner series, which was based on organic, candid conversations about our experiences as women and the women’s rights movement. Our process in creating work involves creating a framework from which to explore an idea - we set parameters from which to explore a topic, but do not set every element in stone. The work we create exists in a social realm - it is very much based on the interpersonal relationships, ideas, decisions of the collective. We like to think of our work
A still from
Women Cinemakers as allowing for chaos within a framework - it’s exciting to set up basic parameters and see what emerges. As you have remarked once, the name "
" is an homage to Marcel Proust's
description of an involuntary flood of sensations evoked by the simple act of tasting a madeleine cookie and seeks to trigger inspiration through projects that showcase significant subject matter in ways that engage, educate, and excite contemporary audiences. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "
": does your artistic research respond to
? In
particular, how could art could help the process of making aware a larger audience about increasingly urgent matters? We are making work in a time where people with different ideologies have stopped listening to one another. Often times, we seek to create a space for listening and understanding through the telling of
Women Cinemakers personal stories so that we may bridge the everwidening gulf between opposing ideologies. Art can position ideas in a context outside the everyday world and everyday hierarchies, structures, established politics. We are oftentimes less guarded when we encounter and experience art. In this way, art has the potential to bring to light and explore social issues in unexpected ways. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once remarked that " ": how would you consider the relation between ideas you explore and
of the of
producing your artworks? Abstract in the sense of the ideas we want to explore, and the complex conceptual nature of those topics. We see art and its creation a possible exploration of an idea which may be abstract because of its complexity, as an exploration of that idea through
Women Cinemakers one concept - one possible iteration. Creation is the act of taking something abstract and making it real and tangible, to realize it through one possible iteration. We want to take a complex issue, a wicked problem, or a nuanced experience and find entry points for audiences to understand, relate, and have conversations. Marina Abramovic once remarked the importance of not just making work but ensuring that it’s seen : how is in your opinion online technosphere affecting by the audience? Do you think that today is easier to speak to a particular niche of viewers or that online technology will allow artist to extend to a broader number of viewers the interest towards a particular theme? Yes and no - while it is easier to reach audiences online, there is a disconnect, sense of anonymity to the online experience. Much of our work exists online, but we strive to connect through a physical presence, in physical space and specific place whenever possible.
Women Cinemakers
Over the years your works have been showcased
of how viewers receive and reflect on what they see
in a wide number of festivals and locations,
in our work. Standing amidst the audience during the
including Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Luminato
installation of
Festival, Jane’s Walk, Ryerson University, York
Blanche, Toronto’s all-night contemporary art festival,
University: how much importance has for your the
it was powerful to watch the audience experience
feedback of the festival circuit? Do you consider
during Nuit
and react to the work.
the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process?
While we make art because we want the audience to
As artists who often create work to be experienced
listen and be moved in some way; the projects must
by in-person audiences, we are definitely conscious
first speak truth and power to us - we can’t imagine
Women Cinemakers
creating something that we don’t feel passionate
movement in a post #metoo landscape - what it
about.
means intimately to our experiences, stories and
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Nicole, Alexandra and Cheryl. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something
the people around us. Follow us on twitter and instagram @mcocreate and visit our website at madeleineco.com to learn more.
about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? We are further exploring ideas for artworks that respond to and further the women’s rights
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Women Cinemakers meets
Angelina Voskopoulou Lives and works in Athens, Greece
Some words overwhelm you like an alien spirit and you surrender…. It’s the words. Commonplace words making up uncommon sentences, strange words carrying an unutterable weight, words set one after the other so as to create images, feelings, little lights illuminating wide streets. And then there’s also the magic. That inexplicable magic of some people’s words that you know to be right upon hearing them, you know them to be yet another key to one of many doors…..
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Angelina and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to invite our readers to visit https://avos.wordpress.com in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of introductory questions about your background and process. Marked out with a solid education in the United Kingdom, your artistic research is characterized by incessant experimental approach, and whose results
provide the viewers with a captivating heightened experience. Rich of allegorical qualities, your works seem to provide with a materic essence the abstract ideas of memory and perception: when introducing our readers to your usual process, would you tell us how important is for you to produce work of arts capable of challenging the subconscious level of your spectatorship? What is emotion? As we watch films we can each experience fear, and pleasure, and desire, and surprise, and shock and a whole array of possible emotions, but we will not all experience these emotions equally.
Spectatorship is an important concept in film theory. The film builds a specific relationship with every individual who experiences it. What we experience in consciousness is inflected with and shaped by the unconscious and that addressing the needs of unconscious life can be fundamental to aesthetic appreciation. Life and memory: The key contemporary photographic and video-film narratives. Memories is a key component of who we are. Its subjective and fragmentary nature forms our personality. It is a matter of philosophical debate since ancient times. Through art we record and preserve and try to dominate its fleeting state. When we remember something from the past we think of it in parts as if putting together a puzzle, which is really ready and exists in our minds‌when we think of our past that helps us become better persons‌ As a medium, film is unique because it captures life in a way that cannot be captured through other forms of art, like painting or photography. Experimental film is a term for moving images that explore the human condition, nature, or fantasy in ways that havent been traditionally explored before. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Skin deep - an hymn to Eros, an extremely interesting dance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/mnuoDrd_hJo. Centered on the resonance between the body and its surroundings, this stimulating film has at once impressed us of for the way you have been capable of providing the results of your artistic research with such captivating aesthetics, inviting the viewers to such a multilayered experience: when
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Women Cinemakers walking our readers through the genesis of Skin deep an hymn to Eros, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? When I create a video work, for the most part, I am creating videodance, (also known as screendance), I am not documenting. I am making dance for the camera. I choreograph a piece knowing that I will re-organize and ‘manipulate’ the material during the editing process. combining Elements such as time, space, speed and spatial composition. In addition, one incorporates the movement of the camera, as well as the composition of the frames. Even though the body in movement is the ‘seed’ and inspiration of screendance, often the movement phrases get ‘throw’ around, the end becomes the beginning, the body gets fragmented and layers of dancers end up superimposed into different backgrounds, creating a new work which in some cases is far apart from the movement material that it was based on. My decisions are based on the rhythm and composition of the new piece, as well as on the design, contrast and the proximity to the camera. I am trying to create a creating a visual metaphor. Using a combination of both, narrative and location. The concept of a video choreography, in my films, is based on my own lyrics texts and ideas. The central idea in this film is arising from the question of Love…This word that dominates the senses…which has never been deciphered. I believe thats where its magic lies. I wouldnt like to lose this magic, wouldnt like to shed too much light on it, because that is when itll become irretrievable. Ill play with it, Like I did when I was a little girl
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers A more intense oscillation culminates in greater energy. The energy change and the delicate change in its coordination may constitute the beginning of a process. Birth or death. The energy reduction of the frequency of a vibration may cause something to manifest itself as matter in the material and visible world. What is more, the increase of a frequency of a vibration causes something to manifest itself as invisible energy. Everything is driven to an “energy alignment” at the specific point in “the present”. Therefore, although the greater part of our knowledge of the world is dependent upon light, we are unable to fully conceive of its properties. The Body- It is the shadow of an existing object. Of some other object, some other shape- form-figure and not simply of a body as it is perceived by the imperfect human senses. There is no such thing as isolated people. They are not separated by a void. They are united by light, radiation. They are capacitators of the same material and are forever communicating with each other. If we feel isolated, it is because we dont fully comprehend the universal continuum. We dont feel, havent sharpened our senses so as to realise that we are not alone. Loneliness is our personal problem, not a problem of nature. Nature did not create us alone, we brought it on to ourselves. We experience loneliness which its the result of our own actions and our own perception There is nothing to be taken for granted. Is anything to be
taken for granted in love, for instance? Once you take something for granted in love, love is dead. We have appreciated the way your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How important is improvisation in your process? Improvisation helps keep you on your toes, not tied to a script. And, if you're doing it right, it helps you take everything personally which creates a better stage presence as well. Without improvisation there can be no creativity— only mimicry. Through this you are accepting, cooperating and communicating… so is actually the opposite of the fear reactions. Fight, flight and freight. In other words youre going form fear to trust. Featuring well orchestrated camera work, Skin deep has drawn heavily from the specifics of its environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful resonance between urban and natural environment, as the breathtaking views of Castel del Monte - and dance: how did you select the locations and how did they affect the performing and shooting process? Nature has always been close to my heart. People today have forgotten they're really just a part of
Women Cinemakers nature. They destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They don't see that they're going to perish. I have always been interested in studding and practicing art in various forms. The body , itself,is living art. Our movement through time and space is art.Our bodies are used as portals to move through this world. The base of all our communication with one another. It is our flesh and blood that is the base of what makes us human and how we are all linked to one another. Castel del Monte is one of the most mysterious building works. The building appearing in the film is one that reminds of the original castel de Monte- an ancient castle very close to Olympus Mountain. The one called Platamon Castle. . The filming was very difficult due to the needs of the aerial performance. There were lots of things to be considered before filming. Each scene was a meditation on the landscape, with dance-characters entering a leaving frame, becoming one flowing organism. Each choice of light had its own purpose, I set the tone of the scene, trying to introduce or trying to breaking away from a dream sequence. Art is for the people, it is supposed to move us and allow us to see the world from different perspectives. The scenes has to be taken from real life experiences and presents them in a way that is relatable and allows the viewer to submerge themselves in the film and view it as if they are the character themselves and each memory or dream is their own. Reminding us of Peter Greenaway's surreal atmospheres... We have been really impressed with your film, and we really appreciate the way you
explore the resonance between the body and its surroundings, capturing unconscious emotional reactions, as well as your sapient use of offscreen space, reminding us of Pina Bausch's Die Klage der Kaiserin: Skin deep challenges the viewers' perceptual categories to create personal narratives: what are you hoping Skin deep will trigger in the spectatorship? In particular, how much important is for you to address the viewer's imagination in order to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I keep thinking that We might do not need a text-based cinema … we need an image- based cinema. Something close to poetry in motion. A poets duty is to tell what others are afraid to express and help his fellow human get through life… Cinema uses our life. I am Trying to combine elements of various art mediums and use them in film, combining poetry, photography, and paintings in most of my experimental shots. Its a great honor , actually, to be mentioned next to great artist, such as Pina Bausch and Peter Greenaway. Both artists of true inspiration. Pina Bausch has changed the dance and theatre landscape forever. Always provocative. Watching Bausch's choreography is like watching life through a train window: unexpected peeks into private places. So, some parts of Bausch work wash the past, leaving you unmoved, while there are moments which leave you wondering how she got the keys to your soul…where you step, you will find that everything moves in perfect symphony with everything else. Peter
Women Cinemakers
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Women Cinemakers Greenaway, believes that everything is connected and relevant to the artist. His work has been trying to invest a lot of energy and imagination into the notions of strong and effective pictorial communication‌ My short films are an expression of my thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: its about sharing the way I experience the world, which for me is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone‌ The combination between sound and visual is a crucial component of your artistic practice and we have appreciated the way the effective sound tapestry provides the footage of Skin deep - an hymn to Eros with such an ethereal and a bit enigmatic atmosphere: as an artist particularly concerned in the connection between sound and moving images, how would you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see the relationship between sound and movement? For me, filmmaking combines everything. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. In the first scene, music composition is interpreted with harmonica instrument combined with finger clicks on the microphone, resulting in beats and buzz that resemble a distant pseudo- rhythmic storm. I chose as a model the process music (based on minimalism, a transformation of original melody) Key characteristics: oscillation, coordination, meeting, truth.
The second part was played with synth. Key characteristics: searching, loneliness and awareness. These days, to be experimental is to begin to speak a language that not everyone speaks yet. Putting music within a scene changes it completely. Its a combination- a synthesis of poetry and film that generates associations, connotations and metaphors neither the verbal nor the visual text would produce on its own. That the essence of poetry is its unique presentation of ideas, is the art forms ability to inspire a state of rational and irrational bliss through language. The words themselves become images and appear as visual text on the screen. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, in the last few years your have been searching for new possibilities to break the physical and mental boundaries as a performer. To emphasize the need of establishing a total involvement between the work of art and the spectatorship, Swiss visual artist Pipilotti Rist once remarked that "we are trying to build visions that people can experience with their whole bodies, because virtual worlds cannot replace the need for sensual perceptions." Do you think that this statement reflects the direction of your artistic trajectory? Moreover, do you think that the role of artists has changed these days with the new sensibility created by new media? The body has been an integral part of the self-concept, and body image has come to play an important role in contemporary society as a means of constructing,
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Women Cinemakers symbolizing and expressing one’s selves. Performance art is the "unconscious" scenery. Dreams and traumas are the content of this unconscious, and the performer's art is to externalize these and enlarge them, so that they become available, ultimately, to the gaze of the other. It’s something you can feel. The technology allows me to feel more, not less, connected to what I am creating. Technology is reshaping what art is and how it’s produced. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes: how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? Through my films, I am trying to expand the possibilities of visual/conceptual connections and offer different ways in researching the notion of visual metaphors, while at the same time using audio-visual temporal specificity make possible for more direct metaphorical connections. I could say that a material body does not simply develop but reaches its original stages. The Body- It is the shadow of an existing object. Of some other object, some other shape-form-figure and not simply of a body as it is perceived by the imperfect human senses. If life is the greatest form of art, then it seems only natural for artists to use the physical body as a medium. The body in performance art is a ... passage and transformation of sense and sensation into
and through the flesh of the body. It produces its own level of significance. For the performer, exposing his/ her own flesh gives rise to an inverted theoretical movement. Through the performative act, he/ she can loosen oneself from his/her own flesh and be directed back to it. For example contemporary dance, to a high degree depend upon the body and its alteration. A relationship between artist and her artwork is a relation between her body and physical world that encircling her. It is a process during which the artist reshapes reality in accordance with aesthetic criterions. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Why have there not been many women artists in the art scene? The answer probably lies in the fact that women were neglected as artists, or anything that differed from their assigned roles, whichever period that was in. art started to be seen as a powerful medium to introduce the world to a womans point of view about their socio-political status, to describe their lives,
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Women Cinemakers personal experiences, to show a womans body in a different light, coming from the very owner of it. The goal of it all was to create change! We should keep fighting for womens rights, giving them a vision of a better future. When I reflect on the question of sexism, I realize I dont think of whether someone is male or female; what is most important is that they excel at what they do. I believe there is a lack of female representation in every segment of the art world—from artists to art dealers and business leaders to art collectors; especially at the top. This is not new and unique to the art world alone. It takes will, focus, and patience to overcome this challenge, but the future is bright. I am an optimist. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Angelina. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? My last work fuses the use of spoken word poetry, visual images, and sound to create a stronger presentation and interpretation of the meaning being conveyed. its a cinematic poem. .. It has never been important for me to know exactly why I am doing it. The basic sensation is wanting to do what I do‌. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
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Roosje Verschoor Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
I am an artists that uses photography and video as her medium. I aim to show the layers of traditions, stories, situations and locations. I focus on how all the elements relate tot each other: how one element can be part of another, from which perspective we interpret situations or how we could interpret them. I use both truth and fiction to tell a story, meaning I combine found footage with my own images, video and text.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant
influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your direct the trajectory of your artistic research?
womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Roosje and welcome to : before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would like to invite our eaders to visit in order to get a wide idea about your work and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you graduated with a Bachelor of Photography, that you received from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam: how did this experience
Before going to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, I studied Dutch linguistics and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. This woke my interest in the structure of stories and language. What fascinates me in literature is the indirectness. Through working with language in general I discovered that I was even more triggered by visual language. That’s when I decided I wanted to go to art academy. At the Gerrit Rietveld Academy I learned to be more precise in the stories that I tell and to develop an idea into an actual concept for a
work, while remaining critical during this process. Furthermore I developed from making autobiographical work to making work that shows my personal view onto the world and the questions that come to my mind. In that sense my work is still very personal, but more extrovert than introvert. I wonder about the time that we live in. We are constantly seeing photos and videos of incidents that awake our emotions, there are cameras everywhere. Yet we have very little influence. I strongly believe that it is in our nature to come to aid when we see someone in distress. This tendency to respond and help is also triggered when we see someone in distress on the tv, but we are incapable of reacting on the spot. For this special edition of we have selected , a stimulating multichannel film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your video is the way it provides the viewers with such an intense multilayered visual experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?
The Weather Forecast is a product of the feeling powerless and the multitude of images that
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Women Cinemakers sometimes literally flood my mind. By seeing footages of refugees I was surprised by the rejecting way Europe reacted on the situation. I tried to understand what was at the basis of our Western thinking on borders and responsibility. From these images of people trying to survive on water and my interest into stories I started reading about the story of Noah’s Ark. I noticed the perspective: the story revolves around the chosen ones that make it to the Ark, but there is hardly any talk of the ones that drown. As research for The Weather Forecast I made different short films about the story of the Ark, which woke my interest into the role that water plays in our lives and how water stands as a signifier of how we are divided. The European border is partially determined by water. And in New Orleans the breaking of the levies (after hurricane Katrina), showed the world the difference between poor and rich: people with means had the opportunity to flee the city before the water flooded the streets. After creating a few short films I decided to return to the images that troubled me in the first place. In the installation I combined found footage with my own. The voice-over is also a composition of texts that I wrote. A part of it speaks of my experience of being flooded in images, another part speaks of how the weather is predicted (you can never trust the weather forecast here in the Netherlands, it’s always off), and another part of how to act to survive a flooding. I wanted the text to add to the realization the illusion that we are in control in an unexpected situation.
Featuring unconventional editing, has drawn heavily from : how was your editing process in order to achieve such stimulating results?
In the original installation of The Weather Forecast there are 18 channels, on two screens, that loop every five minutes. In some moments the channels respond to each other visually. The installation is shown in a dark room with sound. The synchronizing of the images was a mathematical
puzzle, that I solve by editing the different video’s on a big screen as a collage. The work was made by a lot of trial and error. Since the first time we had the chance to view we have appreciated the way it unveils the point of convergence between the abstract nature of movement and the physicality of space. Art historian Ernst Gombrich once underlined the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so that they can
in the creation of the illusion: how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's imagination in order to address them to elaborate ? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood?
It is very important that my work resonates with the viewer. I find it important to show how archetypical stories lay at the basis of our thinking. In The Weather Forecast I chose t use a recognizable type of
imagery, that enhances the viewer’s experience that they’re familiar with from viewing the media. Our relationship with water also consists of fun and recreation, beside the fear that it can cause. A tension is created by placing the different images next to each other. As an artist particularly interested in showing the layers of traditions, stories, situations and locations, how important is
in your practice? And how does fuel your creative process?
In the process of creating a work I always do a lot of research. I travel a lot and use my impressions and experiences from these travels in the nexts steps of creating. For The Weather Forecast I visited a man in the South of Holland that had rebuilt Noah’s Ark, according to the measurements that are given in the Bible, since he believed another deluge would soon follow. For other projects I traveled to Surinam (Moengo and Botopasi) and recently Malta, where I look for stories and underlying assumptions. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "
": as an artist particularly interested in questioning local-global themes, how do you consider the role of artist in our unstable and globalized contemporary age? In particular, does your artistic research respond to ?
I definitely think that my cultural perspective plays a big role in my work. Concerning the Weather Forecast: I grew up in the Netherlands, that largely lies beach the sea level and could possibly become flooded with the melting of the polar ice caps. Also, I myself am a person that enjoys recreating in water, while also seeing the images of people surviving on water, or feeling from water. Through my upbringing and education I strongly
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Women Cinemakers believed that everyone deserves equal opportunities and that we shouldn’t distrust other cultures. This stems from a post-war climate in the Netherlands. I am am now struggling with the current sociopolitical context that is very different. To me it seems that the language and the values that my generation grew up with, have been replaced with anger and fear. Of course I often wonder wether the values I was taught were sincere and universal to begin with. As you have remarked once, you use both truth and fiction to tell a story, combining found footage with your own images, video and text: what are the qualities of the images and of the footage that you select for your artworks?
For the Weather Forecast I was looking for images that we have imbedded somewhere in our memory. Images that were created by stories we were told or images that we saw on the news. In a lot of cases I found these type of footage online and in other cases I created material. In general in my work I really enjoy creating my own material, but sometimes found footage says it all, or says it better. In this work especially the juxtaposition of footage recreates our experiences with the constant input of the media and the effect this has on our collective memory.
Over the years your artworks have been internationally showcased in several international occasions, including your recent participations to , in Amsterdam and to , at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art: we have particularly appreciated your ability to create works of art capable of establishing with the spectatorship, so we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of medium is used in a particular context?
When developing my work I work very individually and intuitively. I don’t usually decide on the medium in the first fase. I do strongly believe that you should always show and evaluate your work with other. So when I am actually physically making the work I invite my friends and fellow artists to look at it and tell me there impressions. This sometimes changes the work completely since I highly value the effect that the work has on an audience, even though it stems from a personal interest or fascination. I make art to tell a story, to ask questions and therefore the audience is very important. I believe in a balance between expression and reaction to the world around me. Even after finishing a work I really appreciate the reactions and opinions of my audience. This inspires me for future work but it can also change the way I speak
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Women Cinemakers about a work: the voices of the audience add to the meaning of the work. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ' ', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: as an artist interests in the cinematic arts with feminist theory, how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field?
I believe that this in time more than ever it’s possible and also important for women to develop en express themselves independently. I find it important to grab the opportunities that are at hand and to add to the female canon. At the same time there is a risk that these type of concepts will also be institutionalized and create It is crucial that women makers expand there freedom, research feminisist concepts and reinvent institutionalized ideas that have been appropriated by society so that we will not be restricted by the prevailing general consciousnesss. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Roosje. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
I am still working around the theme of flooding and I have filmed in a small village in the jungle in Surinam, that was flooded in 2006. I am currently editing the footage and I hope to release the movies, that I will show on an installation of two screen, later this year. In september I am going to visit Toronto Island in Canada that was flooded in 2016. I will conduct a research into the transformational effect of flooding on our environment and our experiences. I find Toronto Island an interesting place since it was transformed from a peninsula into an island by a storm and the waves. Up until now, I have reflected water and flooding, at the moment of its appearance, as a violent movement and its ability to draw physical and social borders. I will now look into the aftermath of flooding, to study flooding as a force that takes from and changes a land and a community forever. I’m going to research how water transforms material and reconfigures landscapes and I will assess how ‘watery’ landscapes reframe familiarity, and challenge traditional and conventional experience of place. I will my conduct my research with interviews and photography (both my own photographs as photographs or clips that I will 'borrow' from the community), so that I can create an archive as a basis for my research. I will study the subject of flooding, drawing upon cultural and social interpretations of home and domesticity, of materiality and of landscape. An interview by Francis L. Quettier
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Carolina Jonsson I paint, but in an expanded field, mostly using film and photography. My work often refers to painting and at first glance a video can be perceived as an ever so slightly moving painting. Since 2012, I have been collecting working material in an archive named Ecolonia. The archive contains expressions in film, photography, sculpture, and installation art. I garner materialities, perceptions, and sensations found in everyday life and encountered in nature. The collected body of various phenomena, lived experiences and emotions, is adapted via a set of digital editing techniques imbued with an intuitive rationale. The material undergoes a digitized abstraction development but always with outermost regard for the innate and unique modes of expression of all life. I am searching for small movements or minor changes that occur within something durable and ongoing, which over time progress in a spiral-like cycle pattern. This implies ongoing time that always returns but in each instance in a slightly altered form. Time thus creates monotone move- ments that in themselves create a rhythm. A monotonous rhythm indicates the stillness of time. I want to provide circumstances that lends the void a space; a place where the seemingly insignificant resides alongside silence. My work relates to the “in-between” which exists amongst humans, human and nature, between the natural and the man-made. It strives to challenge the boundaries between human, nature, and machine. The void, the gap, the movement-change between still or moving images and between scenes is also of great significance. As an intermediary movement, empty space houses anticipation. The in-betweenness of empty space leaves room for everything and nothing at once. The wait is a precondition for change. The image archive Ecolonia provides opportunities for innumerable reconfigurations of the materials I collect. Moreover, Ecolonia is my language, my way of describing a reality we co-create with our surroundings. I’m interested in conveying the hidden, that something ‘more’ which resides in nature and goes beyond what meets the eye. Within this system, the everyday is revalued. New worlds and situations arise that can be both beautiful and daunting, they may contain recognition as well as alienation. The open and ongoing archive Ecolonia also contributes to an exploration of contemporary society’s relationship with nature. It does so by accentuating the aesthetics of experience which might help further a shift in the human conception of an unpredictable nature as an object to be mapped, controlled, and dominated. Movement is an intrinsic part of how time-images are constructed in my practice. Movement also relates to other aspects of inter-embodied processes. One could imagining an approach to movement as a mode of thinking, as the pacing of an embodied mind. To ‘think’ through the embodied mind would then be a process parallel to conscious thought. This manner of conceiving of an embodied mind as a movement in space, e.g. dance, constitutes new and unexpected expressions of what it implies to be struck by life itself. Much like the treatment of sore bodily trigger points can conjure up new, till now unknown responses in other parts of the body, a walk in nature may evoke unexpected thought processes. The connection between these events remain concealed. It leaves us with a fleeting sense of being whole. The human body is taught to position itself and react to current ideas and notions of the society it is immersed into. The cultured human body is therefore literally a pattern of habitual repetitions of familiar movements and positions. When the body is introduced as an element in my work it is not so in capacity as an individual subject, but rather as a creature, a parallel existence, a part of nature. While still recognisable as “body”, the human form, momentarily reframed though digital manipulations, is no longer conditioned by its habits but instead expressive of a new difference, an incoherence, a something ‘not yet seen’ or experienced
An interview by Francis L. Quettier
we would like to invite our readers to visit
and Dora S. Tennant
https://www.carolinajonsson.com in order to get a
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wider idea about your artistic production and we
Hello Carolina and welcome to WomenCinemakers:
would start this interview with a couple of
questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your Bachelor of Fine Art, you nurtured your educa- tion with an Master of Fine Art, that you received from Trondheim Art Academy: how did these experiences influenced your artistic trajectory? (Moreover, what does draw you to re elaborate the same themes, recontextualizing the same video materials?) When I arrived at the academy in Trondheim I was a painter and during my first year I mainly was tutored in the department for painting. The education in fine arts had separate departments for painting, photo, sculpture et cetera but it was not that hierarchical, on the contrary it was an open and generous atmosphere that invited the students to move freely between the departments and to try out various media. We created freely, started from practical work and build the theory from there. The academy was well equipped when it came to digital technique and there was a technici- an who always was available for immediate support. That meant a lot for me because I was able to spend many long hours with exploring the possibilities of moving images and through this I found my own language. The nervous character of the video that could intensify reality and the aspect of rendering motion and time attracted me more than painting as a technique. At the same time, I could preserve the way I related to art as a painter. I continued to work with layers, but to build up the images (now moving) using digital manipulation techniques instead. This mode of working allowed me
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Women Cinemakers to maintain a painterly quality and still pursue a narrative poetics. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Painting of Ecolonia #12, an extremely interesting video installation that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful in- quiry into the resonance between the body and its surroundings, is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such refined aesthetic, inviting the viewers to such a multilayered experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of Painting of Ecolonia #12, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? For me, a working process is always preceded by a sensation of something that insists on my attention. I want to capture and define the ‘thisness’ of this (or the ‘what’) in a piece of art. In the case with Paintings of Ecolonia #12 I came across a roadwork landscape. This beautiful landscape evoke a sensation of emptiness and desolation, and an underlying apprehension about what would come. A consistent feature of my practice is a will to describe my own, subjective experience of the surrounding world, of the ‘more’ of nature which is hidden from both the camera as well as the hu- man eye. I am also occupied by certain themes and problems which I relate to and negotiate when I commence new work. In Paintings of Ecolonia #12
Women Cinemakers there was the human intervention in an other- wise constantly changing nature, found in the roadwork landscape. The tension between the divide that man makes of nature and culture was highly relevant for the advent of the work. Not until the work is completely finished, its synopsis is written. To fix the scenario in advance in writing would be to pre-empt any eventualities and discoveries made along the way of production. During a brief period when the road was built, I returned multiple times to the same building site. I observed it in the separate phases of the building process, under different weather conditions and time of day, contemplating the site as it appeared in different shapes as it was outlined against its environment. Out of the collected material I finally chose the scene for Untitled Painting #12. Then I planned a studio recording with a dancer who I wished would familiarise herself physically with the site, meet it and respond to it. These two films would then add to one another in a way similar to a process for painting. The way the light is set in the studio is REALLY important for it to be able to function in relation to the landscape and also add something more to the original film. The whole dance scene is carefully planned in detail. The light, the clothes, where in the film he or she shall dance and what feelings the body movements are supposed to mediate and of course the choice of dancer I should use. I directed the
dancer, Fanny Kivimäki, in the studio by providing her with an ‘emotio- nal framework’ and directions on transposition through space to comply with the image construc- ted for the camera. Other than that she was free to improvise the choreography of a scene drawing from her own artistic register. A big part of the charge in the film originates from the meeting between the dancer, I, and the light & production assistant. The dynamics between us is essential. A lot centres around this relationship between the members of the crew. It is a relationship which requires that we are respectful of each other’s otherness and vulnerability. In the same manner as the camera in the moment of capture becomes an extension of myself, the three of us becomes part of the same body in the moment of making a scene. We have particularly appreciated the allegorical qualities of your work and the way Painting of Ecolonia #12 involves the audience into heightened visual experience, raising strongly charged ex- istential questions and urging them to explore the struggle between reality and dreamlike dimen- sion and to create personal narratives: how do you consider the relationship between the real and the imagined playing within your creative process? The presentiment of what I might be able to mediate prompts me to explore something. This sensa- tion is not crystal clear and concrete, and it often leads me down a road and a process which is not always logical
Women Cinemakers or predictable. For me, it is crucial that the process is playful and fun, it should not be confined by any limit or boundaries of reality – I need to feel I can spread my wings. The rhythm of time creates a sort of meditative motion onwards, or, a gap in between the outer time we exist in or between the scenes you have seen or will be seeing, that can provide rest. What deviates, but cannot be wholly defined, evokes curiosity and causes the beholder to linger and ponder. My abstracted imagery relates through a poetical narrative. The new language, carried by abstraction, provide us with the opportunity to see the habitual in new ways and thereby opens up possibilities for us to discover ourselves and our surroundings without preconceived perceptions and understandings. A room, contiguous to the outer frames of our reality can function as triggers to our mind flow. The open-ended possibilities offered by fantasy, dreams, and the unconscious – in relation to reality which only actualises a fraction of an immense vastness of all possible futures and realisations – interests me greatly. A particular aspect of your artistic research that we would like to deepen regards your explora- tion of the notion of time, that reminds us of Bergson’s theory of Duration. As you have remarked in your artist’s statement, ”a monotonous rhythm indicates the stillness of time. It provides a space of silence, a silence that can be used for thoughts and
reflections.” How do you consider the rela- tionship between time and movement? I want to make a description of the presence in the present tense, of that which is nearly perceived but never tangible in the moment and is reconfigured and reconfiguring reality every microse- cond. Thus, in my work I am applying minor iterations and configurations of movements within a notional framework of cyclic time. Within this time-space, a monotonous rhythm and its intensive stillness represents a space for waiting, anticipation, and expectation, it is an in-between place. This abstract space provides potential for new beginnings. In the road work site in Untitled Painting #12, for instance, there is a charge in the air. An expecta- tion, but also fear, for what is to happen. The course of events in the film provide with a pause to reflect upon the borders between man, nature and machine. I am interested in a sort of sculpturing of time, like Andrej Tarkovskij has written about. Every film scene has its own form for time, or description of time. When the scenes are joined they should therefore have a similar form of time in order not to disturb the monotonous movement that runs through the film. Apart from the shift between scenes the dramaturgy of the film, instead of differences in speed and tempo, is carried forward by different intensities.
I don’t want to project time in space and make it linear. In scenes where the images are shown through several layers multiple timely experiences are given parallel to one another. A mutual per- meating, an intimate organization of elements where each represents the whole and only differs to an abstracted thought of a beholder. As the notes are lined up one after another in a musical piece, they too create an experience of a whole in the present. An essence that in the same time is identi- cal and changeable and that lack ordinary concepts of space. In addition, as Bergson writes, every new direction in a movement is indicated in the preceding one. For example, once we have learnt to walk, we do it instinctively. It is not until everyday mo- vement is intercepted by pain, aches, or other functional variations, that we have to relearn how to move, not in the same manner but in a new language altogether. The idea of indicative movement underpins especially works of mine where the human body/form is brought into the imagery, such as Untitled Painting #12 and The Mind is A Muscle. The anticipation of direction and movement in space has its basis in habitual thinking about the world and how we navigate through it, in a wider sense. By drawing attention to the ‘broken lines’ on a soft curve, I want to challenge an perceptual idleness. It’s important to remark that since 2012, you created Ecolonia, a personal archive that contains
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Women Cinemakers a wide variety of materials: how do you consider the role of memory in your work? In particular, how do you consider the role of direct experience as starting point for your artistic research? In particular, how do the details that you capture during daily life fuel your creative process?
added memory of its past figurations and their interpenetrative and irreducible emotive content.
The meetings I have in ordinary life: brief, hardly noticeable events that linger on via observations of landscapes, people and their surroundings, are always what capture the interest in the incentives for a working process. The idea, sprung from such a sensation, is then saved, either as a note or as a raw, untouched film scene in my archive. There, they often lay, awaiting a sort of maturing process that sometimes takes several years. Maybe I come across similar phenomena or sensations that re-actualize the idea again and one day I am ready to examine the idea further and turns it into a work of art. It has actually happened that I have seen the link between a work and the first sensa- tion around the phenomena that I experienced a very long time ago but back then never under- stood how that sensation could be handled in order to form it into art.
Just as the memory can be fragmental and its prints wander freely between places in time and spa- ce, my film scenes can also move free without an apparent logic or order. The archive also functions as a memory bank and I am free to use film scenes over again, to create new constellations of sce- nes or other forms of installation. A new window of display with its untested context provide new presumptions for the archive to generate. Ecolonia become in itself a metaphor for the human cog- nition, awareness and all these processes. Some memories are preserved in the body. The memory of how to brush ones teeth as well as trauma is built-in in our bodies. The unbound movement in the work The Mind is a Muscle shows layers of lived time while the controlled movement in Untit- led Painting #12 reflects the absence of memory of previous meetings with a similar environment where the milieu seems strange and the movement of the body shows an exploration of that milieu as alien and unknown.
The image archive Ecolonia, and the way in which its parts are reconfigured into unique and discrete artworks in my practice, could be considered analogously as ongoing heterogeneous multipli- cities of time, related to the notion of a mobile memory which Bergson refers to as pure duration. Every new reconfiguration, cut and distortion, within the scope of a work carries with it the
Your practice seems to reflect German photographer Andreas Gursky’s words, when he sta- ted that Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what’s behind something: as an artist particularly interested in sensing something hidden and open up for more outside what is already known, are
Women Cinemakers you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, How open would you like your works to be understood? I do most definitely relate to Gursky´s words. I would like to reconnect here to the poetical narra- tive I mentioned earlier and emphasize that I employ a framework for demarcation of the theme. I.e. one side can be seen through the other - death is described through the depiction of life and what is absent is given a strong presence. In this case it is given what is absent but it is open for the beholder to decide on interpretation and in what way one can draw a connection to one’s own life. A framework is created that does not comment the beholder’s personal associations but shows generosity to the beholder’s own space of interpretation. As an example to illustrate the complexity around space of interpretation I can mention an installation I made in an environment for pallia- tive care. I was glad to have received a commission that took place in this certain context because I was intrigued by the aspect of working with a theme about life and its cycle. I choose to formulate this cycle with body movements that depicted different phases of life, physical experiences and moods. One body movement was ordered in several layers and seemed to be dissolving and there- fore reminded of the transience of our existence. I tried to emphasize the deeply rooted ability to heal that our bodies and nature have and to create a place, or non-place, where possibilities, change
Women Cinemakers and reconciliation with our own bodies and life occur. To my assistance I had an art council in which among others a coordinator of social care issues from the city council took part, and during the working process I had a thorough dialogue with them about the theme, how the work would be performed and its intended function in that particular environment, as we all were very aware of how extremely fragile this context was to display art in. When the work finally was installed some of the staff who experienced it for the first time – without no prior introduction to the work or the intentions of the artist – immediately reacted to the black surface in the background on which a body seemed to be dissolving due to the many layers. They quickly decided this work was not wanted. This example describes not only the complexity of producing art for public space and in particular environments susceptive to human pain and suffering, but it also illustrates how little I can control the beholder’s own space of interpretation or their willingness to further reflect about what they experience. There are always two sides of the same thing and sometimes, due to the volatile nature of our own existence, one only sees the negative side of life’s fickleness and not its possibilities. Another interesting work that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled work ”The Mind Is A Muscle” and it is centered on the inquiry into the relationship between dance and movement and how they affect our mind. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of
the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physicality of the movement that plays such a relevant role in your artworks? When addressing dance and movement one can separate between the controlled and the free movement. What separates them are the levels of consciousness and depth. Simply described the controlled movement is choreographed while the movement unbound has a lesser degree of awareness and a greater depth. An untampered movement can be to walk or run, as long as you find a way to exercise freedom in movement. An interesting finding in science has shown that after performing the free movement we seem to have easier to recognise emotional states in other than what is the case after performing a controlled movement. We are therefore more likely to come in contact with our own emotional regulation in performing a free movement. The video installation The Mind is a Muscle has been inspired by the scientist Åsa Unander-Scharins research on how our feelings are affected by seeing a robot dance on a screen. The experiment shows that we can be just as affected by watching someone else’s movements as we will be through performing dance ourselves. In The Mind is a Muscle, I have employed the free movement. When I am incorporating bodily movement into my work it is not about bringing in another sub- ject or to
Women Cinemakers let the human body symbolise something other than itself. Instead it stands as a creature or a piece of nature in its own right. The scenes to The Mind is a Muscle was filmed in a dark room where a beam of light hit the center of the room. The dancer was instructed to move in and out of the ray of light without letting the light shine on her face. In this way the beholder can identify with the physical experience of the bodily movement instead of through the meeting with a subject. The digital manipulations and adjustments in the rendition of body in the film thus communicates in an immediate sense with the beholder’s own body. The purpose of the abstraction and the manipulation is to enhance, clarify and define extracts from brief moments of irreducible physical and mental sensations and intensities. From courses of events excerpts are chosen within which time is stretched. Local, minor contexts are forms of grea- ter ones. To these events, new information is added, information which attempts to give expression to that which cannot be seen exclusively with the naked eye but in addition has to be experienced via the perception of other embodied senses. Note: The title The Mind is a Muscle is borrowed from a performance by Yvonne Rainer, 1968, a choreographed, multipart performance for seven dancers, interspersed with film and text.
Women Cinemakers Your practice is also concerned with the language of poetry: how do you consider the relations- hip between words and images? I do not wish to impose the words on the viewer, but I imply that a sequent reflection or discussion on the experience of the the work can open the wings of the beholder. The words then become important to him or her but they are not mine to give; I give the images. For me, poetry is not about forcing a truth upon a reader. Rather it provides a tickling entrance to something worth reflecting on. When I elaborate on a poetic language in my work it is always figuratively speaking, or, when the work consists of body movements, a body language. To ‘catch sight of language’, e.g. in The Mind is a Muscle, is about how the poetical movement creates new combinations of movements, gestures, and situations and can thereby give rise to new experiences and meanings. It’s no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations, as the one that you have established with dancer Fanny Kivimäki for Into the Roots, are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your work? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines? To Kivimäkis dance performance Into the Roots I made a video installation that was installed as a backdrop behind
Women Cinemakers the dancer on stage. The scenes displayed a landscape where Kivimäki figured both on screen and on stage. The movements reflected one another and communicated. In this way the narrative moved forward both on screen and on stage and in periods together. During the working process we, dancer and choreograph Fanny Kivimäki, I, the light assistant and the composer of the music, worked very close. Every component in the performance belong to one body and every little change correlated to what the others composed. In mine and Kivimäkis work it is either I or she who came up with the original idea and the direction. We then “borrow” the other’s technical competence, artistic expression, or world of ideas, bringing it into our own work. Thereby layers are added from the other’s specificity. During the working process, lead by the one who holds copyright, we work onwards in dialogue and trust one another with generous space for improvisation. In Into the Roots I have defined space in relation to body and Fanny have defined body in relation to space. In a collaboration where the parties have different grasps of reality but complementing competence it is possible, through artistic visions and resources, to discover fields that either party never would have had the possibility to discover on their own. In addition, the col- laboration generates experiences and spin-off ideas that each bring with them for individual future work. I can also appreciate that these collaborations conjure up meetings with new audiences and new areas of display for my art work. Into the Roots are shown in concert halls, in
Women Cinemakers venues for film or dance performances as well as gallery spaces. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ’uncommon’, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what’s your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? That I have made a video in 9:16, the screen standing upwards instead of the other way around (Untitled painting #12) provides a quite figurative answer to this question. The work does not fit in ‘ordinary’ film festivals. I think and relate to my work as a painter but a video does not sell in the same extent as paintings and therefore it is more difficult to be presented in galleries. But this too can provide freedom - you do not have to be ‘right’, to belong to a certain tradition and have to produce works commissioned with certain expectations on media, format, and expression in mind. For me it becomes natural to engage in a project here and there in different contexts, within a gal- lery for visual arts, participate i a filmfestival or other contexts focused on
Women Cinemakers film, to explore different materia and expressions or to participate in interdisciplinary collaborations. At the Academy in the relatively small town Trondheim we students became quite good at self organizing and learned to consider the abroad - Europe in particular instead of just relating to the city we worked in. Many of us has thereafter settled in smaller places throughout Scandinavia and continued to work in a similar way. This is another ingredient of being an unconventional artist that also brings me freedom. I experience that men are catered to in the film and art industry in a way women are not. They are provided with and included in an already existing structure. Women are not expected to have the same success as men which may result in women at times assuming more of an underdog position. Perhaps this leads to that women in general are better in finding new ways of collaboration and create different premises and conditions for their projects. Sadly, this does not mean that these wo- men, with their projects, get promoted and I have noticed that it seems as if men pick up on these new influences and it is first after that sufficient promotion takes place and then the men get all the attention. Why is it so rare with female duos in the art world? I have a low-key and soft expression, which traditionally is called feminine, and that can also be problematic. The women that do get attention often has a traditional ‘masculine’ expression. It is monumental, colourful, and acts through grand gestures. Women in arts are often
Women Cinemakers referred to as a female artist whilst a man never would be presented as a male artist. To be a woman and a parent is also something that can be excluding and deemphasizing for the artistry but it looks right now as if this is about to change for the better. There is still a long way to go but at least we who are cente- red in this problematics dare to stand up and talk about it publically. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Carolina. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? As I mentioned before I often go back to the same object or theme. I will continue to work on the road work site and with the human body meeting nature (see two stills from work in progress). This fall I will start work with an installation project for Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm. A kind of creature like character will emerge, projected onto the wall. The visitor to the hospital will have a companion, from a parallel world, down the corridor. In the future I would also like to explore the possibilities to break taboos like uncover the aging body. The interdisciplinary collaborations and the studio based work with films, that I begun with quite recently has given me greater possibilities to control and expand my production in a most interesting way..
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Women Cinemakers meets
Julia Thompson Lives and works in New York City, USA
I work in sculpture, video, and installation, often employing materials that decay, harden, soften, move or transform. I reflect on the surprise of everyday experiences that conjure up a feeling once felt, of something distant yet familiar. At the crux of my work is the experience of time, investigating its qualities of freezing, stagnancy, and passing. These materials are ways I communicate a convergence of time, a resistance to a “linear reality.� My work expresses conflicts with time as something in and out of my control, in the ways it provides possibility of escape or interruption. I am interested in the middle stage, or, the potential for something to happen. I investigate through materials that can change states - stick, melt, solidify - questioning if material forms can ever exhaust themselves. These unstable moments stemming from my everyday experiences ground my work; in response, my work serves as a testament to liminality.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
is a captivating art project by Canadian New York based multidisciplinary artist Julia Thompson: In her cross disciplinary project that we'll be discussing
in the following pages, she accomplishes the difficult taks of triggering the spectatoship's' perceptual and cultural parameters. The power of Thompson's approach lies in her insightful and unconventional inquiry into the viewers' perceptual processes, using in strategic ways she generates new practical and theoretical perspectives, to urge the spectatorship to explore transient nature of being and we are
Julia Thompson photo by Phoebe Weinstein
Women Cinemakers particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Julia and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied at Parsons in New York as well as at Chelsea College of Arts, in London: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Thank you for having me and for the truly thoughtful questions!! I only graduated from Parsons with a BFA a few weeks ago - I’m still digesting and reflecting upon my past 4 years of studies. It was very overwhelming, dense and both productive and numbing, at times, but don't regret a thing! I first moved to New York when I was 17 years old originally being from downtown Toronto, so have never been too far from home. I think I felt older when I first moved to New York 4 years ago then I feel now. Now, I’m so hyper aware of my youth then I ever remember being. I grew up in Toronto ambitiously making a clothing line for teenage girls, which I got into Parsons for doing, but after my foundation year I realized how much more interested I was in the documentation process than
the physical making process - it was too technical for me and honestly difficult. I kind of walked into the Fine Arts program ignorantly, but the second classes started I was totally absorbed and consumed. My background in fashion still comes through in my current practice, maybe more implicitly, but may exist in the materials I push and that inclination I have towards such. Since then (age 18) I’ve dedicated most of my life to my practice as an artist and have grown and learnt so much about myself and the world through this decision that I made… and still am learning, all the time. It truly was the best decision I ever made. You are a versatile artist and your pratice is marked out with such stimulating feature, that allows you to range from sculpture and video to installation: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme? Process really sits at the crux of my work… it should for all artists. But in how I think about my practice using time, experimentation, materials and their
Women Cinemakers interpolations with one another as communication tools. I don't like to put labels on my practice to a specific medium as thats whats exciting about it - the unknown and how the materials themselves determine what it will look like, feel like, smell like, move and how it will or will not take up space. Before I go about making anything physical I write and read, a lot. My process is always contingent on an aggressive commitment and devotion to a leftover memory, feeling, thought, substance, object which are all materials, that I continuously push into multiplicities - until I’ve exhausted it, or myself. I make art to cope with and embrace experiences I can’t seem to move past - it’s how I move through the world: exploring the excess of everyday productivity and it’s ability to hold significance, authenticity and accountability. I give shape to the inexplicable, seemingly immovable feelings to obtain some kind of control. For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such . While walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?
Women Cinemakers
The project really started in September 2017, although I had been thinking about those specific memories (the projects origin) for a much longer time. As a kind of response and escape to changes I was experiencing I kept returning to these specific memories I have from a small town in Quebec. I grew up spending my summers and some winter weekends in this town. The memories range from 1996 to 2013, but are all kind of circulated around the same few families who go generations back. The town and families there are all quite removed from my current life, so loss and disembodiment are as much apart of the work as commemoration and preservation. The body of work began with this collection of memories I repeatedly wrote down as a means of understanding them or trying to understand their inescapable presence. I eventually pulled back from the linear memories and extracted them into lists, which eventually found the form of perfume ingredient lists. With these lists I was really thinking about how to describe a present absence, one thats uncontrollable and takes up volume, fills a space, which scent so well describes. Various scents also have the ability to call to ones memories and emotions. As the project progressed I began casting the perfume bottles out of a glycerin soap material where I was able to embed these different ingredients. Soap is a clear, transparent material that is always in a state of flux, similar to a
A still from
Women Cinemakers memory and a body - it reacts: sticks, slides, sweat, melts, freezes, etc. Grounded by a kind of impermanence and instability - similar to memory. could be considered report of the idea of memory, and an we have particularly appreciated the way it highlights that the practice of quilt , providing the viewers with a unique multilayered visual experience: how much importance do play in your artistic practice? I’m not sure if I would ever use the concept of metaphors to describe my practice or a part of it, but more so the idea of communication through abstraction or extraction… which I guess could be described as metaphor. I try to create a gap through extraction, providing both specificity and ambiguity in form and flow. Working with perishable materials like soap theres a sensitivity to external factors such as heat, moisture, touch, etc. People tend to describe my work by its ephemeral qualities or one that carries an ‘expiration date’… but I don't like these descriptions as they imply a linear narrative - a beginning to an end. I think people have a very limited understanding of matter and materiality as these single dimensional things with limiting and confining definitions, that often close us off. Theres a book I’ve been reading by Jane Bennett
called ‘Vibrant Matter’ where she writes about these very problems and reframes her approach to thinking about mundane matter and materiality as plural beings - loaded with infinite potential and momentum. In a way, I try to emphasize this idea in my work with the materials I use by questioning if material forms can ever exhaust themselves. I wouldn't define my practice by a medium (as again I think thats limiting), but more so contingent on a material form and the degree in which I can push it, keep it moving… alive. In this case, the soap bottles went from being small scale bottles with ingredient lists to then being filmed melting together in a large tank of water that was saved in my fridge, to then become apart of a much larger video installation. By using a camera’s tools to magnify this change of state, the clarity of object-hood is stripped away and instead depicts an abstract landscape (suggestive of color field painting). The still tank of murky soap water functions as a quiet distraction from the disorienting, camera movements. Now, the tank of water is saved in my fridge with frozen ice soap chunks, having a more stale smell. But I also think this contained liquid, although ‘still’ embodies all the potential it has - bubbles, fog, fragrance, mist, etc.
Women Cinemakers seems to reflect German photographer Andreas Gursky's words, when he stated that : are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate ? In particular, How open would you like your works to be understood? This is something I’ve always struggled with and something I think many artists do struggle with. All art (whether some people like to disagree with me on this) is subjective in some way - it’s always attached to the artist and theres no escaping that. A work can be completely removed from the artist and about someone or something else entirely, but it’s origin is always the author. I struggle finding a balance between holding onto things and letting them go and finding a way to trust the materials in communicating these things. But recently I think I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough actually - purely in the way that I work .Previously, I would research for months before beginning to make something with my hands. I was insecure to try anything if it didn't feel 100% connected to the origin of the project and myself, which was almost counterproductive in a way - materials and process is at the crux of my work and I was so scared to
Women Cinemakers work freely and pleasurably. Now I’ve found a way to research whilst experimenting and playing and it really is so much more enjoyable. I think it has something to do with being done art school and not feeling so rushed to be producing 24/7. I’ve come to realize that the origin of the work is always going to be there, which doesn't mean I have to include everything. Before, I felt pressured to try and include everything in the work and ended up with an overload of information to the point of exhaustion for a viewers experience. Recently I’ve been pulling back, putting more towards the materials themselves and less reliance on the materials list that would sit alongside the works.
instigating a long-term, evolving project? I think materials and the sculptures themselves have the ability to get at these same questions and ideas.
The materials list is a seemingly conventional element of artwork display. In my past few projects however, the materials list is treated as a material itself, further pushing the sculptures’ density. The list serves multiple functions: on the one hand, it communicates spotty memories through the extracted moments hidden within the form of a mundane ingredient list or poem, filled with visibleinvisible pieces. On the other hand, it makes one potentially question what matter and materiality really are. Is thought a material? Can a drunken, half-memory from 6 years ago be a material? Can a slice of an uncertain feeling be a material? And do these foggy “immaterials” have the ability to become and stand in as something concrete,
Shimmering, glowing and at times
On my website you can find examples of these lists! A poem I wrote and performed when presenting this video piece (It was our little paradise) is below — Soaps so pushed forward you don't even know what they are - without even recognition of the notion of bubbles or translucent pink shapes slipping away Soaps melting and bleeding into one another
pulsating as it holds onto itself... Struggling to stand And vanishing into the tank of water Leaving behind a sticky, half-dissolved remnant, coated in white goop Water which was once ‘clear’ becomes muddled ... Weeks later the saved tank of melted soap still sits in my fridge Waiting to be pushed forward... Bubbles, ice, mist, fog, fragrance..Now this is a
Women Cinemakers memory of a memory of a memory…. And that memory is ever receding We dare say that could be considered an effective metaphor of the that affects our globalised and ever changing contemporary age: how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process?
I make art to cope with and embrace experiences I can’t seem to move past - it’s how I move through the world: exploring the excess of everyday productivity and it’s ability to hold significance and authenticity and accountability. Working with and through experiences that don't go away - that consume me. But also working with materials and forms as a way to understand and investigate these experiences. Again… thinking of materials as species or beings that embody feeling by storing and holding onto memory. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the with the ability to establish viewers, who urged to from a condition of mere spectatorship. So we would like to ask you a question about . Do you
Women Cinemakers consider And what do you hope to trigger in the spectatorship?
?
Maybe I do. Primarily, I think what’s important for me is creating and embodying a kind of presence through the work. A presence an audience can see first hand… or not just see but, feel, smell, taste, touch and confront. Why smell is so crucial to my work is how it can hit a body and affect it so abruptly or so softly. In , the overwhelmingly, large scale video projection once existed in a narrow room consuming and embodying the intimate space. At times evoking a claustrophobic and restraining view. The video picks up extremely detailed close ups of soap forms collapsing, chunk by chunk from the warm waters force. As time passes the waters opacity and viscosity changes. The handheld camera work is repetitive as it continuously tries to focus in on something specific but moves in unstable circles. But the source of the whole experience is the little subtle bucket in the corner of the room, filled with melted soap perfume bottles but reeking throughout the space. Pushing this jarring experience or maybe softening it… or nauseating it. I cant control how one responds, but what’s important to the work is that an audience
(whether that be 6 people or 100) feels something… has some kind of affect. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Julia. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thanks so much for the opportunity and such great questions! Just last week I finished a residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York and had an open studios at the end with work I feel really good about. I’ve been working with concrete and candy casting concrete pillows and candy pillows. But also making more abstracted candy blob like forms with old small shrunken photographs embedded that wrinkle and shrivel up from the high heated candy when poured along the images surface. The photographs look like their drowning in the burnt caramel candy and are doing something very interesting and descriptive along the surface. It’s a new way in working so something I will definitely be continuing to explore. I’m taking a few weeks off now but will be getting a studio in Brooklyn at the end of the summer where I plan to make lots of work!! :) An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Women Cinemakers meets
Paulina Rutman Lives and works in Santiago, Chile
Paulina Rutman is a Chilean artist based in Santiago, Chile. For over 30 years, she has been fully dedicated to the field of dance, specializing in choreography and dance film. She has worked in musicals, dance films and performance. Her vast experience and educational background include studies at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA), The Edit Center (New York, USA) and Dance Film Association (New York, USA). She also has her dance company and teaches choreography composition in Santiago, Chile. Her films have been screened in festivals such as File Electronic Language (Brasil), Loikka Dance Film Festival (Finland), Danza Em Foco (Brasil), Dance Screen Festival IMZ (Austria), Dance Camera West Festival (USA), Dance Screen Festival (Sweden), and In Out festival (Poland). My works are born from personal experiences and stories where I use improvisation in dance through the camera. It all comes from inside and is usually very personal. Although it is only a starting point. From there, I am open to the work taking me to unexpected places. Everything depends on what happens in the rehearsals with the dancers and then in the editing film process. It is a continuous dialogue between the camera, the editor and the dancers. With each dance film, I attempt to create a new body language, using film editing as the main choreographic tool. The integration of both techniques (choreography and film editing) allow me to take the dance to another level: amplifying its effects and possibilities, and creating unlimited movements, effects and times. The video allows me to compose the choreography and the choreography is then taken to a new video, which becomes the final work. With each dance film, I attempt to create a new body language, using digital editing as the main choreographic tool. The integration of both techniques (choreography and editing) allow me to take the dance to another plane, amplifying its effects and possibilities and creating unlimited movements, effects and times. The video allows me to compose the choreography and the choreography is taken to a new video, which becomes the final work. My works are born of personal experiences. The theme of each work is spontaneously expressed in improvisation. A personal work becomes collective, since each interpreter takes a proactive role, contributing from their own experiences. That is how it results in a collaborative work.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier
Santiago based dancer, choreographer and video
and Dora S. Tennant
artist Paulina Rutman: its powerful and minimalistic
womencinemaker@berlin.com
mise-en-scène sapiently mixes the ordinary with the surreal, exploring the grammar of body language, to
is a captivating short experimental dance film by
encourage cross-pollination of the spectatorship: we
are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Rutman's stimulating and multifaceted artistic production. Hello Paulina and welcome to would invite our readers to visit
: we
in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we we would like to start this interview with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied at Movement Research, School of Art Institute di Chicago : how did these experiences influence your evolution as a multidisciplinary artist? Moreover, how did you get to experimental cinema? My journey started with dance when I was a little girl. I studied eight years of classic ballet and I started creating choreographies for musicals, while I studied at university. I also learned different dance techniques such as contemporary, modern, hip hop, jazz, afro etc‌. After I finished university, I went to live to New York for one year. My stay in New York was fundamental in defining the next step to take in the development of my career. In New York I wanted to learn and explore all kind of arts disciplines and media arts. I got crazy in the city. I wanted to absorb and watch everything. I studied different kind of arts like painting, drawing and mixed media. I wanted to learn the basic elements of art and design. I thought that first I had to learn these elements to be able to develop any artistic discipline. Then I studied film editing. At the same time I worked as an usher at different theaters where I saw dance companies perform from all over the world. I started working as a Production Intern at Movement Research. During my work, I studied improvisation and choreography
interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
interview
Women Cinemakers composition. Working at Movement Research was a great experience and opportunity because I got to know about experimental work and learned different art forms from the artists themselves. I started working as a volunteer at The Dance Film Association. There I was able to work for the Dance on Camera Festival. This was a great school. I had the privilege of seeing many dance films from all over the world. They have a library where you can watch all kind of dance films from different times. That was a great training and was the moment that I realized that I want to create dance films. After New York, I started to try doing dance films, I think the most important school for me was the experiences, failures and accidents along the way‌. For this special edition of we have , an extremely interesting experimental selected short dance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and . We that can be viewed at have appreciated the refined sense of geometry that marks out your video and what has at once impressed us of your insightful inquiry into is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such captivating aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? The video Fall, came to life after having suffered a severe depression. I started to improvise and film myself. I realize that is impossible to explain in words what is depression and what you feel in that state. After that I decided to do a dance piece for
stage about this. I started to work with the dancers . We explored how revolving ideas around the theme we fall, get up and fall again, how the experience can be during the time when we fall physically and psychologically. I filmed each rehearsal. Then I started to play with the idea of the dance film in the studio. I started playing with the images that I recorded with the dancers and with the images that I had recorded of myself. I attempted to make a self-portrait about a specific moment of my life in a very abstract way.. It was a moment of experiencing new things. Featuring compelling minimalistic narrative drive leaps off the screen for its seductive beauty:
what were your
when shooting?
What was your choice about camera and lens? The work was filmed in the same place where I rehearsal with the dancers. It had very bad lighting but that worked well creating a more interesting aesthetic for the video. I used full and static shots. The most important aesthetic decisions were made in the studio. I also used a black and white special effect. This let me cut the images, make close-ups, multiply the dancers, play with the space, time and shadows. I have always been interested in composition space. It is very similar to what I do when compositioning the space
for a live dance performance. The difference is that with the dance film I can play in a way that I can´t do on stage. Rich of allegorical qualities,
explores
, to draw the viewers through a multilayered journey in the liminal area where the real and the imagined find consistent points of convergence: how do you consider playing with in your artistic practice? Dance films allow you to see things you cannot see in a live dance performance.
What happened for real is abandoned, completely altering the viewers perspective on dance. The way that I manipulate the footage through the editing, lets me play between the reality and the imagination.. At the same time I played with the idea of the fragmentation of time and space in a very surrealistic way. As you have remarked once, you draw a lot from personal stories: how do you consider the role of direct experience as starting point for your artistic research? In particular, how do the details that you capture during daily life fuel your artistic research?
Women Cinemakers I have always been inspire in Pina Baush, one of her quotes is: It is not about art, also not about pure technique. It is about life, and therefore it is about finding a language for life.“— Pina Bausch My works are born from personal experiences and stories where I use improvisation in dance through the camera. It all comes from inside and is usually very personal. Although it is only a starting point. Capturing myself is something therapeutic and also is part of my research. The investigation of the relationship between body and mind has become an important part of my artistic research. In you sapiently mix choreographic gestures with the surreal qualities of the ambience: Art historial Ernst Gombrich once underlined the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so in the creation of the that they can illusion: how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's imagination in order to address them to elaborate ? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? My work usually is very open to interpretation. In the case of FALL, I see it as a meditation and contemplation film. I wasn’t looking for a specific message. I tried to express a feeling, where I play between dream and reality. For me it is a film about contemplating the quality of time through a window where the shadows become an ocean of my memory. The woman who appears smoking in the video is me, but nobody knows that because I do not want to talk about me, I want it to be something free for the viewer and be open to the
Women Cinemakers power of imagination. I want people to have their own conclusions about the film. Also I worked with shadows and small fragments of the dancer's body, that forces the viewer´s imagination to come into play. We have appreciated the way your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the ? details of a choreography and How much importance does play in your process? In my work I usually have a combination of improvisation and a structured choreography. When I work for a Iive performance, I always tell the dancers that I wish the audience could see their improvisations in the rehearsals. You cannot repeat exactly what they did in the rehearsals and that first improvisation has a unique and unrepeatable magic. That is one of the reasons why I am interested in working in dance film, because I can direct an improvisation while I am filming and can capture the magic of that improvisation. They are guided improvisations, with concepts already worked and previously discussed with the dancers. But it always turns out that on the day of shooting something new and magical appears, allowing the dancers a sense of freedom and spontaneity. Sound plays a crucial role in your work and we have highly appreciated the way it provides with : how would you consider the relationship between performative gestures and sound?
Women Cinemakers Sound is an essential tool that can evoke mood and place and alter on-screen perceptions. Music can add atmosphere and mood, pace and drama. It can evoke different times and places and seasons. First I worked with already existing piece of music when we create the movements with the dancers. This helps to create atmosphere and provide inspiration during rehearsals. Then, music is composed especially for the video once editing is underway, so the composed sound is designed as a response to the video. In the case of Fall, I worked with the composer to focus on the idea of a meditation and contemplation dance film. In the case of my last work Humana, the composer recorded tree branches to create the sound of the spiders. Over the years your films have been screened in festivals such as File Electronic Language, Loikka Dance Film Festival, Dance Screen Festival IMZ and Dance Camera West Festival: how much importance has for you that you receive in the festival circuit? And how do you feel previewing a film before an audience? In Chile we have less resources and opportunities for artists than developed countries. So these festivals are great opportunity to share our art. I am not fortunate enough to be able go to the festivals because it is too costly to travel from Chile but at the same time I want to share the work through this great opportunity and want my work to be seen. For me the most important platform is via the internet as the majority can access the work, and you can show to all over the word.
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Women Cinemakers Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Paulina. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Currently I am directing "Humana Dance Project", a multidisciplinary project that investigates the body language of spiders through dance film and contemporary dance. As part of this project, I made the dance film Humana. In this film, I also explored the idea of digital editing as a primary tool for the choreography. This allowed me to create multiple dancers and play with the same components that I use for choreography on stage. Playing between reality and surrealism, bodies are alienated so that the line between spider and human becomes blurry: has the spider become human or the human an animated animal? How do you approach the editing humana and fall? With each dance film, I attempt to create a new body language, using film editing as the main choreographic tool. The integration of both techniques (choreography and film editing) allow me to take the dance to another level: amplifying its effects and possibilities, and creating unlimited movements, effects and time. This allowed me to create multiple dancers and play with the same components that I use for choreography on stage, such as canon, unison, accumulation, repetition and others. The video then allows me to 're-compose' the choreography and finally the choreography is then made to a new video, which becomes the completed final work. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Women Cinemakers meets
Annik Gaudet Lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Finding myself drawn to isolated places and remote wilderness, my art practice is constantly informed by my explorations into the natural world by investigating its inner narratives and reflecting on human relationships with the land. Using my artist lens, I intend to focus on shifting the viewer’s perspective on the land and its natural elements by exposing the underlying mysteries and creating a sense of otherworldliness. Inspired by nature documentaries, I collect my material and ideas via wilderness excursions, meandering in the woods, around coastlines and observing closely the ground beneath my feet. The various documentations that I gather are used to produce videos, multimedia installations, drawings and performances. My work often relies on my body and found objects to contrast against a landscape, resulting in whimsical, evocative imagery that somehow teeters on a line between environmentalism and folklore. It is my hope to create for the viewer a tangible relatable experience through my work’s depiction of my own intimate moments with the natural world.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Annik and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a Bachelor in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts, that you received from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax: how
did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural background direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Completing an interdisciplinary degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University was significant towards the development of my current artistic practice. I started my degree strictly interested in becoming a painter, however NSCAD’s penchant for
experimental and explorative work encouraged me to investigate new avenues to express my ideas, it pushed me to think more critically about my own work as well as the world around me. The interdisciplinary nature of the school allowed me the opportunity to experiment with using different materials and techniques which opened up the possibility of what an artwork could be. It is only in my last few years of University that I became interested in working with video, performance, projection and installation. My interests in travelling and wilderness began with various adventurous hitch-hiking trips that I would take between terms in my latter years in University, which lead to my graduating solo exhibition being an installation about hitchhiking culture. After graduation, I was awarded a production honorarium from Faucet Media Arts Centre where I proposed bringing my video camera to record a hitchhiking journey around the Gaspe peninsula in Quebec and was invited to use their facilities to edit the footage. Later on, I traveled across the continent via backpacking Central America and road-tripping thousands of kilometers seasonally from east coast to west coast for tree-planting work, where I lived in a tent in remote areas of Northern Canada for three months at a time. During the winters, I homesteaded in a rural cabin in the South shore of NovaScotia with a wood burning stove for heat and no running water. These experiences have helped to form a rich tapestry of culture, adventure, outdoor skills and exposure to intense situations that shape my approach to art and life. You are a versatile artist and your practice is marked out with such stimulating multidisciplinary feature, that allows you to range from painting and drawing, to video,
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Women Cinemakers experimental documentary, and other time-based projects: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit http://www.annikgaudet.com in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme? Ideas usually come to me in an organic and subconscious way. My life and my art practice are intertwined in a sense where there is no clear line between where one ends and the other begins. I am always observing, questioning and thinking about the world surrounding me. As an artist, I often find myself also playing the role of scientist, anthropologist, investigator and collector. I go about my life on the lookout for things that peek my interest, collecting found objects and documenting my observations in the field via my sketchbook, photography and video recordings. Filtering through all of this data helps me form thematic connections and reflect on the possible greater narratives that can be implied. Once an idea is formed, I then decide on the best course to undertake it. My work is primarily steeped in ongoing themes of wilderness and travel, I use different media in order to express specific aspects within these themes. Creating drawings and paintings are a way for me to sort through all of my photographic imagery, rendering them into hand drawn images helps me to dissect their content and reflect on their nostalgic value. I also collect old natural reference books which I use when drawing animals and plants in my work. I tend to be interested in creating figure-based
whimsical watercolour drawings that take on folklore and fable-like qualities, revealing a loose narrative around my own memories that is left to the interpretation of the viewer. As for my multimedia and installation work, it usually develop slowly as I focus more clearly on articulating a particular subject through longer periods of thought and research. Certain things can sit with me for years before I find the best form of representation that will articulate my feelings towards a subject matter.
For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have Woodland, an extremely interesting short video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/244102962. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the ambience of the forest is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such essential aesthetics. While walking our readers through the genesis of Woodland, would you tell us what does address you
to center your artistic practice on your experiences with wilderness? Woodland was created through a ritual of walking as research where I chose to hike the same forest trail everyday for a week. As I walked through this forested path, I did so in a meditative-like state with all of my senses wide-open and ready to absorb the colours, textures, shapes and sounds of the forest. I brought with me my DSLR camera and slowly collected footage of the subtle moments and qualities that I remarked. It
is the micro-narratives that take place in the natural world that fascinate me the most, such as the sun shining through the tree canopy resulting in photosynthesis, flowers dangling from bushes overhead, dancing as they advertise their pollen to birds and bees, and the symbiotic relationship between moss and trees. I often chose to relay my experiences and fascination with wilderness in my work as a way to offer people intimate glimpses into the natural world and hopefully
stir within them that primal connection that we all have to the circle of life. I just want to be raising awareness and interest towards our relationship with our land, it is something that I value greatly and feel a need to translate to other people. The footage of Woodland was collected during your time participating in the Murmur Land Studios: Wanderlines field-school. On the visual aspect, Woodland features gorgeous cinematography and elegantly structured composition: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, how did you structure the editing process in order to achieve such brilliant results? Woodland was created from a series of documented moments in the forest, collected individually and then selectively combined into a composition through editing. My shooting was done mainly intuitively, my formal considerations were focused on the aesthetic qualities inherent in each item which informed whether I was going to do a still shot or a more dynamic one. I went with whatever felt “right� in the end. It is the editing process that ultimately enabled me to to add a sense of order and narrative to all of these separate shots. By experimenting with various combinations, I found that some of the imagery mirrored each other, for example how the sun shining through the cedar leaves formed a white ball of light that seemed to echo the delicate dandelion seed head. I found that combining some of the imagery together as well as choosing the right transition
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Women Cinemakers between scenes helped develop a character to the forest and delivered a sense of wandering through it. Woodland seems to reflect German photographer Andreas Gursky's words, when he stated that Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something: are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Yes, I often try to make work that is accessible and that can connect with any type of viewer. Typically, I am not consciously trying to reference art history or contemporary art, I focus on relaying aspects of nature, aesthetics and humanity that I find significant. My artwork often contains loosely formed and sometimes experimental narratives that help give it a sense of pace and meaning. However, I am always interested in leaving the work open for interpretation, allowing the viewer to insert their thoughts and feelings into it and even relating it with their own personal experiences. I just want to deliver new perspectives, alternate points of views and closer inspections that reveal the mysterious and the overlooked within the sometimes seemingly mundane. Deviating from traditional video making, your approach shows a keen eye for details and we daresay that Woodland subverts the notion of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugĂŠ, to highlight the ubiquitous interstitial points and mutual influences between human interaction with
environment. It's important to mention that over the years you travelled extensively throughout North America, finding yourself drawn to isolated areas and remote wilderness: how do you consider the role of direct experience as starting point for your artistic research? In particular, how do the details that you capture during daily life fuel your creative process? Our experiences shape who we are and in a sense empower our identity. They are what we know. This to me seems like a pretty solid starting point in my creative research. As I make cultural, social, aesthetic or even just factual observations during my daily life, these stay with me through my creative process and help me to draw parallels, analogies and relationships that bring meaning and intuition into the work. I seek out travelling and wilderness hikes not just for creating artwork but as therapeutic activities that enrich my life, in a way making artwork around this subject matter is a way for me to process these experiences. We have found particularly intriguing the idea of exploring the relationship between natural environment and an abstract authoritarian presence, that you are currently developing in the installation Please, Trespass. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you’re living under": as an artist particularly interested in human environmental and social impacts, how do you consider the role of artists in our unstable and globalised contemporary age? In particular, does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment?
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I believe that artists have the capability to present their audience with abstract truths that can’t always be put into words. This is a powerful tool that can be used to raise awareness and pose important questions about particular aspects of contemporary culture. The artist has a role to communicate to viewers questions and perspectives that might be difficult to reach without the help of art’s visual language. This type of visual communication has the ability to reach people in a way that can avoid the obstacles posed by the viewer’s personal biases and preconceived ideas by speaking a deeper truth that can often be felt rather than put into words. Critical thinking is the key towards subverting our complacent role as consumerists and holding ourselves accountable for our choices and lifestyle. My artistic research is broad, but in a sense I think that I am sensitive to the impacts of the general social movement towards urban centres. Being native to Canada, there are a lot of empty natural spaces here that are still home to a variety of ecosystems supporting an abundance of wildlife. The further the development of urban centres expands, the more that our footprints and lifestyle encroaches on this wilderness. I feel like my work offers a mixture of awareness, celebration and criticism towards our relationship with these natural spaces.. Another interesting work of yours that we would like to introduce is entitled Sea Grass, an experimental videoperformance engaging with the landscape on an island in British-Columbia that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/240472798. We have appreciated the way you have combined the ideas of the natural and the artificial into such a powerful allegory that seems to reflect our
relationship with nature. What would you like the viewers take away from this captivating work? In particular. how would you consider the role of metaphors and symbols within your practice? In my video Sea Grass, I am presenting to the viewer on one hand the beauty in the landscape of this Western-Pacific beach and on the other I am including an experience that we all have when hiking any coastline, that is finding washed up garbage along the edge of the water. I thought that this found piece of refuse was particularly interesting as it presented several layers in meaning by being a chunk of man-made synthetic grass, an artificial facsimile of nature polluting a protected natural environment. By attempting to reincorporate the artificial grass into the landscape, this absurd action engages the viewer to think about the impact that our behaviors have on the land as well as criticises our inability to manage our own waste. I don’t think that I implicitly use symbols and metaphors when creating artwork, but I do believe that they naturally develop as part of the work. Using contrasting and evocative imagery tends to lend itself towards generating several layers of meaning, it is humannature to draw connections and parallels, to look at the possibility for deeper implications. I consider these tendencies when developing a piece and make conscious decisions towards the role that they play in the work. Over the years you have exhibited and screened your works in a number of occasions and you have had five solos, including the recent Red Sky At Night, Nocturne, in Halifax: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish direct involvement with the viewers, who urged to evolve from a
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Women Cinemakers condition of mere spectatorship. So we would like to ask you a question about the nature of the relationship with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception? And what do you hope to trigger in the spectatorship? The question of audience reception is something that I consider when presenting work, particularly when that work is an installation. I like the idea of creating a space where the viewers can immerse themselves and feel a certain degree of interaction with the work, whether it’s through images, objects, sound or watching a video. I use certain visual cues and placements to guide the audience’s understanding, but ultimately they are free to view it as they like. Generally, I like my work to trigger curiosity, amusement and some thought within my viewers. Also, it is important to me that my work stays in a realm where it can relate to a diversity of audiences. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? I think that like everything else, there’s always been women creating ‘uncommon’ artwork, it’s just that we never heard much about them. Art has traditionally been a male-dominated world where women for a long time were mostly regarded solely as subject matter, objects for the male gaze. I have felt these
impacts throughout my practice, the feeling that as a women I have to work a little longer and harder, especially when presenting unconventional art. However, now more than ever before there is a social shift that is beginning to take place that is critically looking at society’s perception of women. I hope that with these changing times there will be a better and equal balance created for women in the art world. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Annik. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? For the moment I am working towards completing an installation entitled Please,Trespass to be presented during the Nocturne art festival in Halifax, Nova-Scotia this upcoming October. This installation will incite discussion around the environmental and social impacts of land ownership by displaying large-scale imagery of No Trespassing signs found in the forest, presented at night as glowing light-boxes placed in the city. I am very excited about this installation as it steps further in the direction of using my work to make more meaningful social commentaries about the environment. Additionally, the idea of video performances have been particularly appealing to me, I have recently been looking a lot at Ana Mendieta’s work and feel inspired in using my body as a vessel to physically connect to the wilderness.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
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Sarah Crofts Lives and works in in Brooklyn, New York and Bogotá, Colombia
Traditional cinema has been an effective medium for clear, concrete narratives directed toward a variety of specific goals, that play out before a static and captive audience who are temporarily enticed away from their daily lived experience and invited to enter a parallel, representational world. I am interested in fluid forms and open narratives, situated in non-tradition viewing structures and POVs: a peephole view, a room scale projection, which engage with notions of agency and its limits, through the effects of digital technology. I make work that evokes a sense of bodily awareness as well as creates a psychologically ambiguous and contemplative space, concerned with time, perception, embodiment and the act of looking. My films are components of different projects that utilize a variety of media: motion picture, photography, and written and haptic languages. Spyglass is an alternately wistful and frantic contemporary take on a sublime that is diminished and interrupted repeatedly by both the viewing apparatus and the effects of persistent time fragmentation. Transitors looks inward and outward from the observatory of the World Trade Center: a site of trauma and a catalyst for the sweeping expansion of government overreach; it is now also a popular selfie spot. Shifting between the first person perspective in a simulacrum of the 100th floor’s expansive vista and the crowd of tourists within, Transitors meditates on the dichotomy of our lived experience as individuals and our collective actions in aggregate. Meanwhile a simulated whistling wind accompanies a spoken narrative recounting the true-ish story of several drivers unwittingly following each other off the road in a thick fog. Moons considers visibility and embodiment through the relationship of human and celestial forms, described in two brief narratives written in water on a lumen print that gradually darkens like a bruise, appearing over time. Mediated by a blinking apparatus, Seekers is set against the churning sea that refuses to mirror our image back to us. Reflection is often exteriorized into representation, places that evoke a contemplative state are also fantastic selfie backdrops. The collective gaze has turned inward to the self; perhaps it is narcissism, perhaps it’s an obsessive drive to understand and situate ourselves in evolving physical, virtual and psychological spaces. Sarah Crofts was born in North Adams, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where she studied photography and art history. After working for several years in the film industry, she resumed studies at Hunter College in New York and received her MFA in 2016. She has participated in exhibitions and screenings both domestically and abroad. Sarah lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and Bogotá, Colombia.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Spyglass is a captivating experimental video by
American artist and filmmaker Sarah Crofts: inquiring into the nature of perception, this stimulating work could be considered an allegory of the human condition in our media driven age, capable of drawing the viewer to a heightened and
multilayered experience. One of the most interesting aspect of Crofts' work is the way it explores the themes of time, perception, embodiment and the act of looking: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to this brilliant work of art and to Crofts' multifaceted artistic production. Hello Sarah and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training: you hold a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with a major in photography and a minor in art history, and after having earned a wide degree of experience in the film industry, you resumed your studies at Hunter College in New York City and received your MFA: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your interdisciplinary cultural substratum direct your artistic research? Undergraduate studies introduced me to the material and intellectual world outside of the string of small cities and towns where I grew up. The world suddenly grew exponentially bigger and more complex. I graduated, entered adult working life, and like a clichéd right of passage, got smacked upside the head with a new series of lessons from “the real world”. Heavy on the quotations. I had several jobs relating to photography. I worked as a photo assistant at both a magazine and for various commercial photographers, then as an account executive at a photo agency which is a euphemism for sales. Out of the blue, a friend from home called to ask if the artist Gregory Crewdson could scout the home of my long deceased grandmother as a potential location for one of his pictures. I knew his work and managed to get hired
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Women Cinemakers as both a location assistant and camera assistant on that production. This served as my gateway into the film industry. It was here that I learned not just how film and television are physically made, but about the various power dynamics that govern the industry. It was eye opening. Working in film could be summed up as the demystification of processes and systems. By the time I went to graduate school I was more mature, focused, and disciplined, which was necessary as I was also working full time as a location scout on a network television series. This is a very unusual situation, but indicative of my “foot in both worlds” approach to art and film. At times these two worlds overlap, I often find material for my personal work while out scouting. Other times they offer an escape from one another. Each stands in counterpoint. One represents the pragmatic and the concrete, guiding my actions in such terms as necessary. The other represents the realm of the conceptual and the imagination. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Spyglass, an extremely interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/219630322. This captivating work questions the nature of perception and what has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into this relationship is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such autonomous aesthetics. While walking our readers through the genesis of Spyglass, could you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? I spend a lot of time by the waterfront when I’m in Brooklyn, either at the beginning or the end of the day. It’s a working waterfront, with barges, tugboats and ferries crossing back and forth. The
buoys make a sort of melancholic gong in a few notes that move over the water and reflect off the warehouses. Across the harbor are New Jersey and Manhattan, sort of shimmering in the distance. I was interested in working with this visual and it’s feeling of spatial distance and personal connection. I had experimented with the keyhole view in a previous work called Peer, a twochannel video that juxtaposes a traditional frame moving through a dense New York City crowd with the keyhole view searching the waterfront from Manhattan. For
Spyglass, I wanted to focus on inhabiting the keyhole – the psychological space of distance and the attempt to mitigate it. Deviating from traditional cinema, we daresay that your practice reflects German photographer Andreas Gursky's statement, when he remarked that Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something. We appreciate the way you challenge the viewer's
perceptual categories in order to create personal narratives: as an artist particularly interested in open narrative, how would you like your works to be understood? We all experience poignant moments within our personal narratives. I could describe a lifetime of my own, some of which people may relate to, while others not as much. All of which boils down to telling you something. Commercial cinema in general works very hard to direct
an audience’s attention and emotions toward specific ends, denoting a certain authority that is so complete it becomes imperceptible. With Spyglass and other works, instead of strictly telling people something, I am interested in creating a space for speculation, a tone and a backdrop to provoke one’s mind to move about. Subverting the notion of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugÊ, Spyglass has drawn heavily from the specifics of its environment
and we have highly appreciated the way it questions the nature of our perceptual process, and its resonance with the outside world: how did you select the locations and how did they influence your shooting process? Spyglass was made in and about an environment of transition: from the concrete, the solid to the fluid, the mutable. Red Hook, where I shot Spyglass, is a neighborhood at the edge of Brooklyn, where the land slips into the harbor. In this place, my thoughts also slip into a fluid state. The rhythm of the water affects the rhythm of your breathing; you feel imminently present yet the mind quiets and operates on a different register. There was never a thought to make Spyglass elsewhere; it formed out of my relationship with this particular place. A particular aspect of your artistic research that has particularly fascinated us is your inquiry into the act of looking: do you think that there's an elusive, still ubiquitous channel of communication between personal experience and universal imagery? In particular, how does everyday life’s experience fuel your artistic research? En masse 7.6 billion people share many of the same individual impulses, needs and emotions everyday. The channel between personal experience and universal imagery is a long developed and necessary aspect of communication directed toward the possibility of interpersonal exchange and understanding. In life’s everyday experiences we describe the acts and functions of humanity, in all its forms. The routine, the everyday, the mundane can all be entry points for an inquiry into the nature of existence.
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Women Cinemakers One of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. Austrian-British historian E. Gombrich, writing in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, talked about the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so that they can participate in the illusion: as an artist particularly interested in creating works capable of evoking a psychologically ambiguous and contemplative space, how important is it for you to trigger the viewer's perceptual parameters in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? Activating the viewer is an integral concern. I try to create situations that allow space for people to insert their thoughts, or activate their bodies. In Spyglass, the image of water is the entryway for the unconscious, the keyhole directs and reorients the view while the camera searches the horizon, sometimes frantically, each blink cutting to a progressively darker landscape dotted by lights in the distance, the promise of a city, hopeful but unknown. The keyhole connotes a hidden space for the viewer, who while seeing goes unseen, which implicates the body in a certain protected way. Another work of mine, Transitors, a seamless room scale projection of the 100th floor observatory of one world trade center in New York, made the audience intrinsic to the piece. Upon entering the installation one is immersed in shifting POVs inside the observatory, from the vistas outside the windows to the silhouetted crowds within the space. These scenes are projected from the ground such that each person who enters the installation casts his or her shadow against the walls thus
mingling with the silhouetted bodies in the videos. You become part of the work, part of the group, yet the sensation of being bathed in projector light prompts an acute awareness of your own body. This duality underscores the experience of life in the technological aggregate. Are you interested in providing your works with allegorical qualities that reflect the human condition? An image like the sea in Spyglass or the fog in Transitors contains a wealth of associations and metaphors connected to a long history of human thought and art, which immediately orients the viewer and the work. I am interested in imagery that can operate on different levels, or speak different languages simultaneously. This multiplicity creates space for interpretation and personal associations contingent on the viewer. Digital technology can be used to create innovative works, but innovation means not only to create works that haven't been before, but especially to recontextualize what already exists: do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? I guess that begs the question what is the role of the artist? I don’t think there is or necessarily should be a singular mission or role. However, if the most basic function of the artist is to communicate something, there certainly is a growing array of tools to do so to an expanding audience, which is exciting. The flurry of production that happens during the early adoption of new technology is so fascinating. New tools and media are often first handled in the context and manner of their nearest
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Women Cinemakers
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Women Cinemakers preceding technological neighbor, but over time they develop their own languages. For example, early narrative cinema felt very operatic with big dramatic acting and static POVs that bore a distinct resemblance to its theatrical stage cousin, yet over time film developed a distinct style and rhythm – a new language of narrative cinema, which continues to evolve. The development of VR and AR technology as a means of expression – artistic and otherwise, will be interesting to follow, as the medium explores its parameters and possibilities. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in the contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? My experience as an artist, as in life in general, is an ever-shifting mixture of wonder, engagement, doubt and fear borne out of lots of work, and occasionally buoyed by chance or luck, rather conventional after all! As a maker of things that are often unuseful, you invite certain critique or judgment, which can be sifted and synthesized to grow, but the hardest part of being an artist comes when you face the indifference of exclusion. Women are beginning to get some well overdue recognition for what they make, say and experience in the world. I see more of an effort now to include female & female identifying voices in the art
world and the film industry, two spheres that activate the imagination to shape our perception of the world around us. However, there is a long way to go to reach a point of gender equilibrium. Recently women’s voices have coalesced to act as an aggregate force to begin to change the balance of power. Similar to building a legal case, we have had to compile our experiences and voices as a mountain of evidence against abusive power players and structures. This necessity to act en masse speaks to the lack of value traditionally assigned to the individual female voice. But the growing chorus can’t be ignored, and I am optimistic about a more inclusive future. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Sarah. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my work and thoughts. I am developing two video works that I hope to start shooting this year and next year, respectively. One video is a deceptively simple piece about returning to the sea. The other work engages with the idea of the collective female voice, specifically where and how individual voices come together and diverge. Although this will eventually be a multi-channel video installation, the heart of the work is the sound, its harmony and discord in a spatial setting. A few years ago I wrote a handful of vocal performances, Cold Reads 1-4, each consisting of a few different scripts read by undirected audience members, forming a multi-part polyvocal composition. I tried to apply this methodology to the new piece, but concluded that each person should speak her own words, not mine. In a way it’s a relief not to author the script, but harder to produce the piece overall. But I look forward to the collaboration, the process of trying to find a work through the collective act of making it.
interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers meets
Sofie Redfern My work is occupies conceptual, allegoric and abstract notions. With my abstract works what I am primarily concerned with is motion and the flow of a piece. There is a conversation which takes place between the positive and negative space. I instigate a sort of rhythm with my work as it is executed along to a specific piece of music. And doing so translates it into more than imagery, activating the work as a dance, and something in between beginning and end. I can carry on, but I often choose to end once I am finished with listening to the song. At that point I have consumed enough of the tempo and melody and move onto a new one, just as the viewer will with my work and all art alike. This idea reflects life, with it’s constant changing of states, of interactions and rhythms. Within the work you will notice, like music, there are repeated patterns, to create a background which stages the work, then parts which are unique and stand out, like how a melody stems from a chord progression. My conceptual and allegorical works focus on existential questions and the rest conducted by feeling, both being devoid of reason but also asking whether reason is necessary. My conceptual works focus on tackling the question ‘What is art?’ by querying the role of the artist, their relationship with the work and the relationship of the audience with the art. My conceptual time-based sequences are metafictional with editing and narrative which makes the film refer to itself by exposing its own apparatus. My work also intends to ignite philosophical conversation, in particular I spend a lot of time looking at the ethical dilemma of time spent as currency in capitalist means-ends society. I make it apparent that as a result of our relationship with time, choice is put on a pedestal and becomes paradoxical with our awareness of endless possibilities which will always be constricted by time. The gravity of this idea makes it become an important abstract equation between time and choice. It can be looked at through a scientific lens, where reason comes into play or an artistic lens, where meaning takes the reins without the need for reason. Time as an enemy is apparent now more than ever in the information age, with the Internet, our relationship with technology and its impeding on our availability for interpersonal relationships. We are in the age of the soundbite, where distractions are omnipresent, deeming our choices for the way we spend our time more important than ever before. often in my work I strip the background information away from the main subjects. The idea of taking something away is to make the viewer more aware of what once might have been present due to its absence, which I make more evident using a solid colour to represent nothing. This elimination of background content deals with the idea of the subject being estranged from what we know as the present. This concept of singling something out also examines how we reconfigure the meaning of art once it is in the Gallery and away from the artist and its original context, ultimately questioning what is required to make and item into art.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier
we would like to introduce you to our readers
and Dora S. Tennant
with a couple of questions regarding your
womencinemaker@berlin.com
background. You have a solid formal training and
Hello Sofie and welcome to
:
you hold a BA (Honours) in Fine Art, that you
received from Staffordshire University: how did this experience influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, does your direct the trajectory of your artistic research? First of all I would like to say that Staffordshire University is a great place to study art. The studio spaces are grand and also work formally as an environment to exhibit artwork. Each week I had one to one sessions with lecturers and visiting artists which really helped to formulate the line of enquiry in my work. In my first year I studied the body and wanted to find interesting ways of playing with the psychology of the viewer. A work which I particularly liked was Dara Gill’s Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits), which are action portraits of people who have had a rubber band flicked towards their faces. The idea of staging one person experiencing something which were translated in a visceral way with the audience had moved my work into focusing on a single figure experiencing something emotionally in my second year. It was Bill Viola’s work that made me transition to video as I was interested in the way his videos shared the same quality of paintings, with an immersive darkness which is familiar of Rembrandt’s work. We were fortunate enough to work with actors for the day, and I had a few ideas lined up. I owned a broken television with a huge crack down one side, and it would only reveal half the screen with light beaming from the crack in the other half. I intended to have the actors enamored with the crack, and whilst they would prod and poke it, a light would shine out
interview
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
Women Cinemakers
interview
Women Cinemakers towards them which reflected the same colours as the clothes the actors were wearing. I also shot another scene which was to be shown on a regular intact screen, where the actors were in a constant state of looking for something. The actors were filmed separately with green screen and in post-production I put them in the frame together, in complete darkness. I wanted to communicate a sense of absence with every aspect of the making of these films. The merging of analogue and digital imagery was my way of exploring what it is to be present, with each other and with technology. My cultural background does influence my work as I want to juxtapose our Western habits with Eastern beliefs. I am a fan of John Cage, which is how I came across the book I Ching, and I was then led onto discovering ideas in Zen Buddhism. For example my work 2016, features a man in casual officewear, improvising a script based on a recording of a 1950’s housewife who had undergone a trial of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. The words evoked a sense of rediscovering the world around her, and witnessing true beauty during, one could say, a state of propelled enlightenment. You are a versatile artist and your pratice is marked out with feature, and before such stimulating starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating
Women Cinemakers approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme?
walks the viewers through such a captivating multilayered experience: while walking our readers through the genesis of
I would say that there are certain mediums which intrigue me as I want to explore the threshold of what they are capable of. It depends on what I want to explore, if I wanted to use sound, I would find a way of letting the sound communicate itself on its own. If I wanted to use video, I would focus on single movements as a way of deriving a certain feeling from the viewer. And if I wanted to use a still image, I would have to consider the way the picture delivers itself instantaneously as a whole, whilst considering the areas which lead the eye around the whole image. As with sound and video you are more obviously directed, you follow, whereas with a painting, photograph or drawing the viewer will see the entire image at first, and unless the artist intentionally wants the viewer to follow their workings, the viewer chooses what to look at. we For this special edition of have selected , an interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . We have particularly appreciated the way your insightful
, would you tell us
how did you develop the initial idea? In 2014 I discovered Douglas Gordon’s work at The Sensory War exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, where I saw
1994. It was a medical film from
the First World War of a soldier so psychologically affected that he struggled to get up from the floor. But what was so captivating to me was that it was played in slow-motion, and so the unsuccessful attempts at getting up were exacerbated, in order to help us feel this person’s anguish. So, inspired by Gordon’s work, in 2017 I decided I wanted to play with time, to try and better understand the mechanics of perception when time is what orchestrates it. I chose the moon as a subject because of its enigmatic qualities, there are many folk tales about it and I wanted to create an immersive experience using visuals and sound to give it a metaphorical notion and to address what the moon means to us. I thought about how the moon signifies the night, and how the night is our end of us perceiving the now, as we sleep, until our day and the now begins again. I wondered how I could transfer this idea across with sound, and got the idea after using an old telephone which had an ideal hanging up noise once I had finished my
Women Cinemakers conversation. I experimented trying to find this sound and discovered something very similar by digitally distorting a bassoon and accompanying it with a tonewheel organ. The melody I wanted to achieve was serious, weighty yet comtemplative. And when the film and audio came together it worked in a way that sounded as though it was pulling the moon onto the screen and then away, with a profound introduction, and then a solemn goodbye.
walks the viewers into a visionary adventure and it could be considered an report of the complex and conflictual relationship between the night and daytime: how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? In everyday life I find my ideas come to me when I don’t try to force them, inbetween doing things, where the mind is left to wander. Such as waiting in queues and walking to and from places. What fuels my creativity is immersing myself in other art, and theoretical texts, or poetry. One can actively look for art in their everyday, by using their perception to recontextualise an object, by looking at the uses of an object and trying to understand what makes them what they are and how this can be changed to be seen through an artist’s lens which is usually to make a point about something or to ask a question. I enjoy practicing associative thinking and divulging metaphors from what ever I am seeing.
Women Cinemakers
Sound plays a crucial role in your practice and you are particularly interested in the intersection of poetry and sound. According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a '
' that affects Western societies
favoring visual logic,
that occurred with the
advent of modern alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you consider the role of sound within your artistic research? With this age of the sound bite we have an expectation of instantly receiving information. Even with a story we demand to know what it is about as we have a fear that we may waste our time with it. And we are inundated by choices. With sound however, we cannot offer a summary with words, there are words, a title, but they do not capture the entire essence of the experience. And as aforementioned, sound carries you along with it, it does not lay out a list of sounds to experience, rather, it always keeps you in the present. And there is a wonderful array of things to do with it, the ways in which you can orchestrate silence and sounds together to provide a certain feeling are limitless. Like John Cage I want my sounds to speak for themselves. In my work I will use a single instrument to see what the capabilities are when using it on its own, such as my song
, where the bass part of the piano
plays the man, and the treble clef is the woman, and they commence an argument which becomes heated as the
Women Cinemakers
song plays. Or I will use a multitude of instruments in order to get across a rather complicated situation, which requires a range of sounds, like my song which has variants in tempo and harmonies to emulate a car crash and the aftermath, such as the uncanny state of the passengers for which I used violins and the Planet Six pad synth. So I would say that my sounds play a very theatrical and emotive role in my work. We would like to introduce to our readers a body of works from your recent artistic production entitled : we have really appreciated of thoughtful nuances of your pieces, that are often marked out with intense tones that create both tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones you decide to use in a piece and in particular, how do you develop a painting’s texture? For the colour palette I use photography as a reference, I am particularly attracted to colours that either contrast aggressively, or colours which merge softly into each other. I aimed to merge a palette from industrial scenes combined with scenes from nature. With these paintings I aimed to create chaotic and distorted forms derivative from the type of Jazz I am listening to. With Moscow for instance, the tempo was fast and busy to coincide with the
A still from
Women Cinemakers traffic in the city from a bird’s eye view. With Freight Containers I listened to slow tempo Jazz which created a melting motion as my hands danced to the music. So really I am letting the sounds create the work, which was an idea that came from my love of John Cage’s work and also Robert Morris’s 1961. Marked out with on their surfaces, your paintings have a stimulating ambivalent quality, and sapiently mix references to real world with the dreamlike dimension: how do you consider playing within your creative process? I encourage myself to imagine ways of altering the reality I am witnessing by experimenting with different senses to ordinate an oblique perception. I often think about the way that our lives can be altered psychologically by what we hold as references in our minds to what we are experiencing. We all hold a different view of the world and the situations in our heads can be portrayed in a variety of ways depending on who is imagining it. This is what is so special about art, it comes down to choice, and we all have multitudes so vast that achieving a unique work of art that appeals and communicates clearly to many with similar interests is not hard. Often I find the dialogue of my imagination stems from feeling, and I use sound to help
Women Cinemakers promote and emphasize that feeling further. Which is something I have always done, I indulge in my feelings and attempt to turn them up to an intense level, often by listening to music. Which I suppose has been the reason why I am directed towards creating soundtracks for my films.
One of the qualities of your work is the fact that they engage the viewers to draw from their cultural substratum to elaborate personal interpretations, addressing them . As you have remarked in your artist's statement, your conceptual works focus on tackling the question ‘What is art?’ by querying the role of the artist, their relationship with the work and the relationship of the audience with the art: are you particularly interested in structuring your work in order to urge the viewers to elaborate ? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I am interested in our perception of time today, our getting from A to B lifestyle makes me want to explore the in-between, and how we are more likely to meditate during this time. We meditate when we are still and focused on one thing at a time, not tormented by choice, questions and unlimited answers. I want my
Women Cinemakers work as a whole to question the now and for us to understand through meditating on and with the works, how feeling leads us through time. During my depression 7 years ago I discovered through the loss of all feeling, how much feeling dictates our lives. Which is why as an artist i am addicted to emotion and ideas of how to express an emotion. Most of all I want my works to speak for themselves as if the audience themselves had made it. We have appreciated the originality of your multifaceted artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on
in the
contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something '
', however in the last decades
women are finding their voices in art: how would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on in this interdisciplinary field? To me the future is the same as the future of human art in general. It will continue to be based on the individual experiences of the artists and the things that happen around us. We will continue to discover new techniques and styles which will continue to evoke an extraordinary
Women Cinemakers emotional response. Hopefully, in the future, it will have nothing to do with the sex of the artists. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Sofie. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? My future projects will involve a lot more movement, which is something I am experimenting with at the moment. I intend to work with technology, using chance methods to fine interesting outcomes. I have been gradually collecting suggestive words and phrases which aim to explore what conceptual art actually does and also our relationship with art in general. For example one phrase is ‘Take Me With You’, which I believe has a few connotations in relation to what art does, what the artist wants and the art market. I see my work headed in two directions, one is audio and visual taking on abstract notions, the other is conceptual, and I will hopefully merge the two when appropriate. Thank you for this interview I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the answers to your questions.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com