urban research on film - directors lounge 2012
film / video / installation

 Program Overview

urban research
program I:
habitats, homelands and bridges

Saturday, 9 February 2013 — 18:00

Chris Bravo films two places seemingly unrelated; Wall Street New York and a place in the countryside in upstate New York. Both are connected by activities of the Occupy Movement and both appear to be strangely familiar by the use of his montage techniques. The public strength of the movement may be connected with making the cold centers of these cities accessible again, even though corporate space is designed to keep out the feelings of familiarity.

In similar ways, activities by artists may have effect of feeling connected again. Stephanie Gray explores the city with her hand-held Super-8 camera and tells us about mundane but familiar places, like the old pizza place that will be closed on the other day. Kevin T. Allen is picking up sounds from three bridges in New York, transforming their parts to "organs" or body parts. Even the artificial super-impositions and montage by Rhayme Vermette about "Tudor Village", give us a familiarity to the commonplace residence built in 1968, or possibly even more so, an idea of what a place needs to feel at home in the contemporary city.

Janus Victoria shows us the city of Aurora, Philippines, which can be a confusing experience for the newcomer, but she also tries to warn against the glossy illusions of easy success.The rhythm of human interactions is what makes it a real place. Telemach Wiesinger in his new film goes back to the sources of early cinema using small staged, funny scenes intervening with the places in "Europe" that he is filming. However, the 'alienation effect' makes those places he loves to film—harbors, steel constructions, bridges, and metal roofs—more human, accessible.

The films of this program, and their mostly visual interventions, illuminate how places have to be accessible, transformable and mundane in order to be human spaces.

A sound-based study of three similar but distinct transit spaces: the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge. The film treats the bridge as an anthropological body for discourse, as a physiology of limbs, organs, eyes and ears moving in time.

Frame shot every five steps while walking across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Hand-processed color 16mm film.

Shot at various sites of the Occupation movement in 2012, including Zuccotti park, Wall St, and on Occupied farm sites in upstate NY, In Habitat is a response to the political interpretations of occupation, and investigates the intersections of different forms of occupation.

Five Roses Pizza will close down on the next day. A memorial and celebration of mundane micro culture in the neighborhood.

When do we decide to move?

A spatial investigation of "Berliner Fenster" on 16mm film. Once the center of West-Berlin, this public-private partnership has tried to revive the area around "Bahnhof Zoo". The hand-held camera explores the space between the glass facades.

The Portrait Series is part of an ongoing series of filmed places, stories and histories of Cascadia. "Black and white 35mm footage, subtly tinged with loneliness, both juxtaposes and compliments the rich, vibrant voices sampled from a radio broadcast tribute to the record shop..."

A hurt tree alone and ignored in an alienating urban context. The small moment captured on this street epitomizes our sense of displacement from the wilderness that formerly occupied this space.

In pursuit of an eclipse, the citizens of Winnipeg ßee the city. Meanwhile, stranded in Tudor Village, the caretaker does his best to interrupt their trajectory & entice everyone to return. This Þlm uses characteristics of collage to assemble a discourse about place.

In a city where encounters are anonymous, impersonal, and unsatisfying, sometimes the most human connections are born out of the most random collisions. Pulsing through the veins and arteries of the city is the relentless rhythm of time. A portrait of Aurora, Philippines.

For the film poem Telemach Wiesinger develops his own image of Europe. In this series, featuring sequence shots of approximatly 2,5 minutes in length, France, Ireland, Germany, Greece and Switzerland are in the field of vision. Teamwork of Wiesinger and Andreas Gogol.

Skyline! Stop-motion animation using paper clips.

Set in the city of Ahlen, it imitates an amateur's film of the landscape framed at sunset. While the city strip is pre recorded the sky was captured in real time from a webcam shooting the sky of Naples. The work confront themes such as exile, migration and border control. Poem by Ghada Samman.

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Directors Lounge 2013 daily program