Interweaving
Filmography: 2018/19
Interweaving (2019 [digital])
2,5 k video loop, 2 minutes
For the most part the making of threads is a human speciality, depending as it does on dexterous movements of the hands, sometimes working in conjunction with the teeth – as in the preparation of sinews for sewing. In most of its uses, too, the thread depends on the human hand’s distinctive precision grip, which allows it to be held and manipulated between the thumb and forefinger.
Tim Ingold, 2007
Weaving a ‘connective tissue’: Interweaving is an attempt to compare the craft of weaving with highly digitalized operations like surgery or filmmaking. The short video was shot during a visit at a women’s cooperative of weavers in Akrich, by car about one hour away from Marrakech. Juan Rojas Routon and I were invited by the High Atlas Foundation (HAF), a Marrakech based NGO, to accompany the project leader and a trainee to the workshop in March 2019. Thinking through making, according to the social anthropologist Tim Ingold, is essential to any art form, to the hand made and to creativity as such: “the knot is surface-creating. The surface we perceive, however, is not the knot but the space taken up by it” (Ingold 2016 [2007], 64). The weavers at the cooperative in Akrich introduced me into their art of rugmaking. They showed me the basic knots. I found myself sitting with two women in front of the loom, practicing and occasionally videoing.
Sheep (2019)
16 mm, color, 18 f/s, 4 minutes
Light sensitivity of analog film material is in the focus of this multiple exposure short film. Sheep is part of a trilogy of 16 mm works I have made together with the landscape anthropologist Juan Rojas Routon in Morocco in March 2019. I used the camera to trace the places we visited together with the intention to generate material we can share and further elaborate in the future. Thus, the camera serves as mediator, as communication tool that allows us to sensitively shape the ways of how we want to collaborate with each other. A common process is being introduced. I entered for me, at the time of shooting, entirely new territories.
Dyer (2019)
16 mm, color, 18 f/s, 4 minutes
The craft of dyeing: Dyer is inspired by my research on gestures in surgery. The film was shot in the medina in Marrakech where the landscape anthropologist Juan Rojas Routon and I observed a dyer and his son at work. The sensory aspects of wool dyeing, bright colors and delicate textures, caught my attention. The short is a colorful snapshot of the procedures. I recorded with my digital and 16 mm cameras with the intention to make further analog exposures at the studio later on. The camera gaze glides over the above the head hung up wool slivers. It enters the little workshop. The body of the dyer is marked by the hard work he is doing. His back is curved. Blurred traces of a rotating body appear occasionally. A hand gesticulates.
Tanneries (2019)
16 mm, color, 18 f/s, 4 minutes
Animal skins and the material of film: Tanneries, the third short Juan Rojas Routon and I have made in Marrakech, equally addresses material aspects of craftsmanship and the sensitivity of the film emulsion. Work that is still performed by hand currently is subject to massive transformations. Digital technologies increasingly lead to the disembodiment of reproduction and interaction. I use analog filmmaking as handiwork. The camera is becoming an instrument that deeply penetrates those realities, which are in danger of being taken out of our hands. I load a new film, feel the material gliding through my fingers while it is transported by cogwheels from one spool on the other.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank all of my countless collaboration partners, patients, surgeons, anesthetists, scrub nurses, my colleagues in the social sciences and visual arts, and, last but not least, people of the local communities I visited during my travels! Without them, my research and artwork would be impossible. The research project Visceral Operations / Assemblage is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Thank you!
Interweaving (2019 [digital]): https://vimeo.com/380261048
Sheep (2019): https://vimeo.com/380253394
Dyer (2019): https://vimeo.com/380256482
Tanneries (2019): https://vimeo.com/380259035
Password: corporealities