Womad (2016) was installed in the gallery space using a 27” Sony Trinitron cube monitor playing from a Raspberry Pi.
The organisers needed some text for the catalogue and I wrote the following a few days before the opening:
Womad
Super 8
Colour, sound
9 min 30
Filmed at WOMAD 1987 festival in Carlyon Bay. The silent film was edited in camera and the contemporaneous audio was sourced from video recordings. We see the effect of time on the film material whilst the people have not aged, frozen in the sunshine of the past. Part of a PhD archival investigation; a collaborator shot one short sequence.
I thought about the text after it was dispatched and wondered whether it was a mistake to disclose the date of filming, anchoring the moving images to the calendar date which might have meaning for the audience outside of the film experience. The status of the work was perhaps changed to that of an historic document versus a ‘simple’ visual and auditory experience. One visitor had attended the event and disclosed this in the comments book.
The presentation of a new work using old footage is interesting. The context of producing work for this PhD is different to a producer looking for material to use in a documentary where the subject of the production would lead a researcher to seek out suitable material in an archive to illustrate their chosen themes. My practice is the opposite, using footage as an end in itself, whether it is visually interesting, or sparks some memory.
The film was edited in camera and I was again reminded of Milena Gierke’s films. I have found a piece of writing (Accessed 27/09/16) from Directors Lounge, Berlin about Gierke’s practice:
“The tough decisions of choosing the right scene matching with the previously recorded images results in an incredible economy of resources, as the artists usually shoots with an 1:1 ratio of used film footage, unless some technical problems occur. At the same time, the in-camera edits often result in the classical unities of action, place and time, or even more so, the films represent the holistic perception of space and time at one location, in one situation. Each film breathes, happens at the present time, and at the moment of its showing.”
Womad has that 1:1 shooting ratio except for some very dark shots inside the auditorium which were excised. How different is the experience of viewing Womad at Being Human – digitised from Super 8, looped with a soundtrack on a video monitor with the artist not present – from Gierke’s projections? The take-it-or-leave-it approach (uncompromising) with by-appointment viewing is perhaps just one end of a continuum with unlimited online access being the other.
“At the same time the encounter stays ephemeral even in its conserved form on celluloid (since long replaced by the less romantic acetate), also because Milena Gierke is opposed to any reproduction of her films as stills, as she insists on the uniqueness of the film viewing experience during a screening.”
Womad (2016) has been screened for one evening at the CMIR 2 exhibition in Bush House, Bristol on Friday 1 April 2016 and now at Being Human 23—25 September 2016.
There’s also the programme note to Gierke’s presentation here regrettably only through the Wayback Machine.
