3.8 to/o close
Sometimes I walk out at night, where the darkness makes life strange. I met the night gardener while out for a walk. He talked to me of trees, disease, highways and fertilizer. He introduced me to the night photographer. I met the night photographer in the fields, where she showed me the same image, over and over again. I looked at the image until it changed and clouded before my eyes. She introduced me to the night dancer. I met the night dancer in a room, a room with many more night dancers. They spoke to me in flashes I couldn’t comprehend. They introduced me to the night runner. I met the night runner in the valley, where they ran and ran. I ran after them until I cramped and tumbled before my legs. Above, in front of me, there were flashes in the sky. That is when I met the night mountain.
program 8 of 12
January 18 – January 30
Vote for your favourite experimental film or video art piece between January 18 and the last day of the screening, January 30. Rules.
artist response
Eirini Tampasouli responded to program 3.8 to/o close with a video, ‘how to fuck the system’. Her film, ‘I Killed My Best Friend’ (16:29) played in our previous program called ‘momus’. Here is her introductory text:
‘how to burn your house?
how to fuck the system!
a flower tomb inside me’
For this edition we invited selected artists to respond to one of the 12 programs in the medium of their choice. Thank you to all the participants, we are endlessly humbled by your contribution.
program
Butthash – Tal Engelstein
7:46 · Israel · 2019
In the center of [the installation] Butthash, there is an eight-minute video following my experience in making ‘Jenkem’: the transformation of raw sewage into psychedelic drugs. The phenomenon exists almost only as a rumor, in rural areas, when the user inhales reproduced gas emitted by his own body waste. This reproduced gas is actually methane, also known as swamp gas, one of the materials that largely contributes to ozone depletion. I filmed myself doing it in various ways with my own excrement on the side of the road, for three weeks. This action uses the body as a drug lab, and expresses an exaggerated form of ecological ideas, resulting in an animalistic perversion.
Disconnect – Raffaella Szilagyi
11:10 · Canada · 2020
Disconnect is a video performance centered around the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Made during quarantine, the work is about the yearning and the passing time that separates myself from natural space.
The video starts on a single frame of a negative, lit from a lightbox. The negative is taken in the mountains in nature. At the time of recording, Quebec is still under lockdown and National and Provincial Parks are closed to the public. As an artist whose work is centered around nature, the environment, and the human relationship with nature, I have temporarily lost my muse.
The act of layering squares of clear acetone over the negative, is the passing of time, until we lose touch with nature and natural space. The negative is barely visible under all the acetone that has been piled up.
A Double Caprice at the Asylum – Stéphane Rizzi
6:10 ·France· 2019
A film found in an abandoned psychiatric institution
(circa 1987-2018)
Street Caress – Laurent HART
1:40 · France · 2020
A music video about caress and sensitivity
The Treachery of Love – June Ann D’Angelo
6:23 · USA · 2020
Having always craved more from the artistic and conceptual angles of erotic filmmaking, I knew that I wanted to break the mold and make an experimental piece that lives without a classic storytelling arc. An art film that just exists and breathes and whispers to your libido.
Inspired by Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images”, I non-verbally argue that the one-sided representation of sex in media, whether through sensationalized click bait disguised as journalism or the male-dominated pornographic vision, strips sex to an act that nullifies its complexities and emotions. Created with absolutely no budget, this piece proves that there is a place for sex in art.
Even more honestly, the film was made as a catharsis as I explore my own status as a 37-year old single woman that produces ‘love’ in my life that never manifests.
I’m hoping viewers will approach this film as if they were at a museum stopping briefly to take the invitation to ponder themes of autonomous love, voyeurism and the definition of porn itself.
collage25 – Luis Carlos Rodríguez
4:04 · Spain · 2020
Collage 25 is an audiovisual intervention in the form of divertimento, based on the film in the public domain Carnival of Souls by Herk Harvey (1962), as part of a larger experimental-audiovisual research project from the point of view of artistic-expressive activities that tries to explore formal, structural, narrative and aesthetic issues. For this we intervene and construct spatial and temporal variations of mythical scenes of the cinema that have passed through public domain. We modify its previous meanings, amplifying or varying its narrative value and its audiovisual aspect, and try to transfer, with moving images, expressive and emotional concepts to the screen. Repetitions reinforce form, narrative and structure, altering any resemblance to reality.
Piz Regolith – Yannick Mosimann
20:00 · Switzerland · 2020
A postmodern Swiss-Tyrolean ensemble ventures into remote mountainous regions, embracing the sonorous variety of local vernaculars. A poetic road movie with stunning shots and an emphatic approach to a new alpine aesthetics.
VOTING CLOSED
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Program 8 Vote: [Title of Work]
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