Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images
(2024)
author(s): Kajsa Dahlberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body.
"Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew.
The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”.
This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.
Palestinian Wildlife Series: embodiment in images, critical abstraction
(2016)
author(s): Rania Lee Khalil
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The expanded cinema performance ‘Palestinian Wildlife Series’ parallels posthuman and postcolonial circumstance, using appropriated imagery of African animals shot directly from a television set in Palestine.
Chronicling the experimentation and process that went into this work of ‘animal-video choreography’, the author interweaves research on Palestine, materialist film, and Afrofuturist thought. The exposition reflects on the impact upon Khalil’s work of women performance artists and avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, presenting a journey from text-based and signifier-heavy early experiments to the wordless and open-ended cinematic outcome the author comes to defend.
Drawing on her transition from live performance to moving image production, this exposition will interest those concerned with interdisciplinarity and embodiment in digital imagery. It examines alternative modes of art activism and political uses of abstraction and experimentalism in art, specifically where critical ethnic and postcolonial studies are concerned. It supports discussions of rights and representation within artistic research and beyond from a diasporic perspective.
In and out of memory: exploring the tension when remembering a traumatic event.
(2015)
author(s): Anna Walker
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The modernist approach to trauma points to an occurrence that demands representation and yet refuses to be represented (Roth 2012: 93); the intensity of the experience makes it difficult to remember and impossible to forget, making any form of recollection inadequate. This exposition explores the repetitive and unresolved notion of trauma using 11 September 2001 as the entry point to navigate a pathway backward into the past and all that was remembered, and uncovers what was forgotten in an effort to lay a traumatic memory to rest. The research began with a journal written on the day of and days following the disaster, which up until a couple of years ago remained closed and unread. Personal remembering is layered upon a well-established collective memory of the event and a vast array of literature, art, and theory written in response to 9/11.
Moving Stills
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Belen Cerezo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The exposition 'Moving Stills' addressees the issue of still photographs that move, in other words, that contain movement through expounding and scrutinising the images that emerge from re-filming a still image. These images could be defined as still and moving image at the same time and here I will call them still-moving. This interrogation draws on the discursive notion of the rostrum camera — a film-making technique based on re-filming still images usually employed in animation and in documentary films and it is composed by a performance-lecture 'Moving Stills' and the artwork 'Moving Stills, Moving Stones'.
The performance-lecture explores certain images that are still and also moving images. The first part of this performance-lecture reflects upon genealogies of the so-called still and so-called moving image. The second one brings to the fore the images that challenge this distinction and introduces the specific case of the ‘rostrum camera’. Finally, the last part presents three excerpts of documentary films in which the technique of the rostrum camera has been employed ‘to move’, in the sense of to set into motion, still images.
The artwork 'Moving Stills, Moving Stones' is composed by two videos, one in a titled monitor on the floor and the other on a flat screen. The monitor shows a ‘sequence’ of a stone-lifting from the film Ama Lur, 1973, also included in the performance-lecture Moving Stills, that. Next, the flat tv displays a video that begins with the technique of the ‘rostrum camera’ applied on still photographs that depict hands (extended palms with outspread fingers, clenched fist…) and later these same images are activated through the tactic ‘performing documents’. The work draws an explicit parallel between lifting stones and the artistic endeavour ‘to move’ images and it acknowledges that the haptic is located between the so-called still and so-called moving image.
This exposition is part of the submission for the PhD study "What is it ‘to move’ a photograph?
Artistic tactics for destabilizing and transforming images".