THE DEPARTING IMAGES + LEVITATE + A PIECE OF WORK
The Departing Images
Ana Edwards / Chile, France / 2023 / 11 min / World Premiere
The boundaries between self and world are porous in Ana Edwards’ beautiful short film from a Mapuche family’s home region in southern Chile.
A dog drinking from the water of a lake. The quiet breath of a sleeping body. The moon between the clouds. Ana Edward’s quietly overwhelming and hauntingly beautiful films from southern Chile envelop us like fragments of a dark and distant memory. We visit a Mapuche family who live side by side with their animals in a wooden house surrounded by mountains and trees. A man speaks of dreaming, of the blurring of the line between self and environment, while Edwards lines up a series of moments in an enigmatic sequence that moves freely between reality and reverie, and between immaterial and physical planes, with an organic naturalness. ‘The Departing Images’ is one of those rare films that, in an almost consciousness-expanding way, is experienced as much longer than its modest length would indicate. A complete world, conjured up in images and sound.
Levitate
Iván Argote / Italy, Spain, France / 2023 / 25 min / World Premiere
A performative and interventionist work, this piece engages in the debate on colonial statues with an autobiographical reflection on the artist’s own origins.
What should we do with all the statues and other monuments from the colonial era that proudly rise above the squares and parks of European cities? You could do what the Colombian artist Iván Argote did: hire a crane, don a boiler suit and simply remove them from their pedestals. That is what he did in Paris, where he temporarily removed a statue of military officer Joseph Gallieni and, in the same gesture, transformed the site itself into an arena for (re)negotiating history in the middle of public space. With actions in Rome, Madrid and Paris, the video work ‘Levitate’ is not only a documentation of Argote’s practice, but also an autobiographical reflection on its conditions, based on his own arrival in Europe. As the monuments hover over their pedestals, Argote raises the question not only of our shared history(s) and values, but also of public space as the place where the democratic drama continues to unfold.
A Piece of Work
Deniz Eroglu / Denmark, Türkiye / 2023 / 30 min / World Premiere
A witty and intelligent meta-film in which the Danish-Turkish artist uses a performative re-enactment of the filming of one of his earlier films to illuminate the artistic process from new angles.
Five years ago, Danish-Turkish artist Deniz Eroglu made the short film ‘A Vacation’ in Turkey about a friend’s prison stay, with the help of friends and family. This new and independent work – which is equal parts comedy, sociological field study and artistic self-criticism – is a performative reenactment of the process of shooting the first film. A making-of (or rather ‘un-making’ of) which, with the artist and his father in the roles of themselves, ironises over the many practical problems associated with making a film. But also about the cultural clashes between the artist and the locals in the small mountain village where filming takes place. The film-within-a-film revolves around Huseyin, who starred in the original film and had just been released from prison, and who is our perpetually unfortunate anti-hero in this sequel. Both films are based on real events, with the difference that the camera in the black-and-white ‘A Piece of Work’ turns out to be a wooden sculpture: a totem around which all kinds of small and large dramas unfold.