Directors Lounge Screening:
Spatial Relations
Deborah Uhde and Melissa Faivre
Thursday, 28. July 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Two young artists who recently moved to Berlin present their experimental video work. On a first view their work seems to be very similar as they use associative techniques of montage and editing, and both demand an active viewer who positively combines and completes the offered pictures to their own interpretation or, story.
This applies specifically to two of the films, “The Space In Between” by Melissa Faivre and “State of the Art of the State – a Dysfunctional Machine“ by Deborah Uhde. Both films seem to work with loosely connected images, which do not easily combine as a story and are brought together by rhythmic editing and a poetic film language. Both films deal with spacial relations, with the space between people and objects, between objects and exterior or interior space and the space between camera and subject.
The film by Melissa Faivre shows two domestic spaces and two people interacting in those spaces, mostly using cameras. One of the spaces has a large bed, a makeshift steel frame and two windows, the other one lots of electronic equipment. The reason for the interaction stays obscure, it may just be a spacial exploration. The gazes from and to the camera distorted by analogue and digital means to reveal secrets about the place or the people or about their relation and it creates some suspense. The interaction seems to follow some performative rule. The viewer is not really asked to analyze the fragments but to put together the pieces of distorted and rhythmically edited information to some visual-poetic experience.
Deborah Uhde’s piece “State of the Art of the State – a Dysfunctional Machine“ seems to be made of pieces of information about a space in a very different way. Views of a science campus, the “physikalisch-technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig”, are being combined on a double screen and edited in associative ways. The rhythm of the pictures is slow and seems to follow the pace of a documented research, the cataloguing and search for art on the campus as the subtitles state. However, we rarely get to see art, at least no paintings or sculptures but strange constellations of buildings, containers, rulers, marks and construction signs, any of which could be part of some art project but very unlikely is so. The one object that looks very much like a modernist sculpture, a steel object that combines spheres and poles, apparently is an object for measurement as the viewer is informed by subtitles. Deborah’s film thus combines spatial views in a poetical and rhythmical way, but then it seems, she rather asks the viewer to critically engage and make their own distinctions between aesthetic and utilitarian spatial use.
Both filmmakers present a number of very different films, set between the documentary and experimental forms. A program of very fresh new experimental films from filmmakers living in Berlin and coming from France/Netherlands and Braunschweig/Germany.
Artist Link:
http://melissafaivre.com/
http://duhde.de
Links:
Directors Lounge http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar http://www.z-bar.de
Impressions of the Directors Lounge Screening “Spatial Relations” with
Deborah Uhde and Melissa Faivre