Side FX
(2025)
author(s): Irina Österberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Across diverse mediums and form, the ‘human’ body, however transient, remains my main subject of events. What is seen, in the eyes of my mind, take place on surface, lens, material, and morph with one another, with the living moving body, disfiguring each other and reconfiguring themselves after consumption.
Embodied and disembodied appearances, reflect on the visceral and urgent presence of the human, live, body. At the start, the notion of mirror: a constant ever-changing image that is formed and deformed as each breath brings life to the body. Different media such as drawing, photography, printmaking, painting, voice, word, sound and video, interrelate with as output a universe of heterogeneous appearances, each with a common denominator: movement of the body and movement of the soul, between the gestural expression of charcoal drawing, the analogue and digital/post-produced sounds, still and moving images, to the carefully crafted and re-elaborated copper plates delivering prints.
At the moment these are called Side Effects, each one a bi-product of the previous step in the process of feedback loop.
“anthropomorphs”; two dimensional images derived from the superimposition of drawing and moving body (drawing>photo>painting>print)
“hesitations”; the more visceral exploration of embodied voice-movement integration, exploring frequencies and resonances of vocal output rooted within the organs of the body
“ghosts”; are the anthropomorphs restituted a third dimension. Sculptures rendered independent to move again, suspended in space, relating to nothing but to their history and to one another.
“multiplicity”; anonymous portraits overlapped and stop-motion animated, searching to grasp the ever-changing nature of (one)(multiple)self, faced with memory and its loss, ancient stranger twins, imagined encounters or the union of multiplicity as one.
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.