Darkness as material - PhD project - 2023
(2023)
author(s): Mia Engberg
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The doctoral project Darkness as Material, examines darkness as material and its relationship to cinematic storytelling. The study addresses different kinds of darkness: darkness in the image, darkness in the cinema theatre, darkness in the spectator where films are received and the darkness in the filmmaker, where the world is reflected and ideas are born. The project is inspired by Marguerite Duras' idea to kill cinema, and it explores film's potential to approach the place she described as 'the dark room, where we are deaf and blind and passion is possible'.
Of Haunted Spaces
(2022)
author(s): Ella Raidel
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.
Naturfilm
(2021)
author(s): Elisa Rossholm, Anna Sofia Rossholm
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
’Naturfilm’ (nature film) consist of three image based essays that reflect on the relation between mankind and nature in Swedish classical nature documentaries, and also on modernity’s negotiation of the separation of nature and human culture by large. The essays include reflections on landscape, natural resources, species and gender relations, indigenous cultures and media materiality. The essays combine images and voice-over, more specifically a series of drawings of still images from existing film footage combined with fragmentary reflections on the images as media inscription and representation.
The essays are media transformations of existing Swedish documentary films from the peak of the classical era, namely from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. In an ecological context, this period represents what is labeled ‘the great acceleration’, an increased exploitation of natural resources, and to some extent an intensified separation of nature and human activities.
DAYS IN BETWEEN
(2020)
author(s): Marianna Christofides
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In accordance to generic tropes in the way the Balkans are represented, conflicts in the region are repeatedly ‘naturalized’ in their description, and attributed geological-seismological features. With the essay film Days In Between Marianna Christofides and her collaborator Bernd Bräunlich recursively visited the Balkans between 2011 and 2015, at first seeking out littoral borders where the course of the boundary remains indefinite. Rivers as invisible yet politically instrumental borders was one of the initial narrative strands. Having lost the first few years worth of audiovisual material, the data on the hard drive being unretrievable, they decided to return, only to find that the places no longer existed in the same way. Both topography and social fabric in ceaseless flux. Their approach extended accordingly, now focusing on loss, omissions, obfuscation and disappearance. The appropriation of nature’s workings in political discourse came to the fore. As did the filmmaker’s inhibiting yet empowering fringe location. Through a reflective lens of doubt agency was re-calibrated. The project grew wider in a recurring attempt at approaching, and began to expand, up until the present and in multiple iterations. Within this non-finite process the constant failure, and the beginning anew, became integral parts of the narrative.
Speculative Sound
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Richy Carey
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Through this paper, I propose a way of considering audiovisuality as an object in and of itself, thinking through its materiality and the role language plays in its construction. I discuss Karen Barad’s Agential Realist methodology as a way of accessing this object with a view to exploring how this might affect the way we sound an image. I propose that the essay film, or an essay film/text hybrid, is the form that can best articulates this way of thinking. I conclude by asking how a diffracted reading of the {sound-image-language} object can be used as a methodology for sounding images.
The doctoral project Darkness as Material, examines darkness as material and its relationship to cinematic storytelling. The study addresses different kinds of darkness: darkness in the image, darkness in the cinema theatre, darkness in the spectator where films are received and the darkness in the filmmaker, where the world is reflected and ideas are born. The project is inspired by Marguerite Duras' idea to kill cinema, and it explores film's potential to approach the place she described as 'the dark room, where we are deaf and blind and passion is possible'.open exposition comments (0)
Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.open exposition comments (0)
Through this paper, I propose a way of considering audiovisuality as an object in and of itself, thinking through its materiality and the role language plays in its construction. I discuss Karen Barad’s Agential Realist methodology as a way of accessing this object with a view to exploring how this might affect the way we sound an image. I propose that the essay film, or an essay film/text hybrid, is the form that can best articulates this way of thinking. I conclude by asking how a diffracted reading of the {sound-image-language} object can be used as a methodology for sounding images.open exposition comments (0)