kino vakaras ELEMENTAL su Miki Ambrózy ir draugais

E L E M E N T A L
featuring SPONGE lab and the oracle

We invite you to continue the conversation around the term “experimental” with different local artist who work with and through the moving image using photochemical means.
The cinematic is tied in with ecology and materiality: the meanings we carve out of chemical and biological entities in making moving images. Our works presented all come out of a tradition of crafting images and materials manually, while our lives remain inescapably tied to the digital contemporary. 
The show explores a mode of making films usually called "experimental". A loaded term taken up by many without much attention to the values within. Artistic experiments with moving images are part of a multi-modal discourse, where boundaries and contexts are fluid. This can provoke "disciplining" from the side of tradition and convention, or an affirmative embrace from transdisciplinary artists.
Which way do we go, as creators, and why? What kind of experience or argument does the spectator end up with in different configurations? What is a critical inquiry using film?

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Program

Black earth gestures (2024) by Varvara Spilt
3‘, Super8 installation, soil 

Shot in Ukraine, Black earth gestures lies between two lands, two geographical locations interdependently: on one hand the trace left in the Ukrainian soil, on another - the soil itself in a foreign environment. The work touches upon memories of a landscape and violence committed against it, nature’s forms of resistance and national identity. Simultaneously, Black earth gestures questions the materiality of moving images.



Does the Sea Have a Heart? by Miglė Križinauskaitė
Work in Progress | Super 8 mm | Color | Single Screen | Sound | 10’

This film is a poetic essay, an ode to the sea. Although it does not place a human being at its center, it is precisely the absence of a human that best reveals the essence of humanity. As poet Kahlil Gibran said, 'There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.'

LT
Ar jūra turi širdį? rež. Miglė Križinauskaitė
Vystomas projektas | Super 8 mm | Color | Single Screen | Sound | 10’

Sinopsis
Ši kino juosta – tai poetinė esė, odė jūrai, kurios centre gal ir nėra žmogaus, bet kaip tik jo nebuvimas geriausiai ir atskleidžia žmogiškumo esmę. Poeto Kahlil Gibran žodžiais tariant, druskoje turi būti kažkas itin sakralaus, nes jos yra ir mūsų ašarose, ir jūroje. 




A Field Holding Ithaka by Miki Ambrózy, oracle (Caroline Daish, Justine Maxelon), and others
Live sound with stick, stone and sand | Color and BW | 16mm projection | 18’

In this performance, we invite you to respond to the landscape, through acts of attentiveness. What is left of a cinematic piece, if we leave aside some of our deeply ingrained distinctions: human and nature, mind and body, theory and action, figure and ground, subject and object, sound and image, representation and experience, reason and intuition? Beyond these dualities, maybe we discover new forms, a language more attuned to life here and now. How can we attend to this landscape? Starting from a loop, a drone, and the voicing of the oracle, we begin….

Seeds of Degrowth

In the series, the artist collaborates with different entities, human and other, to degrow his own practice of analogue cinema. What is a post-industrial cinema? What is the ecological, when the term has been completely emptied of all meaning? What is the place of authorship in an ongoing work based on an ethics of care? 

Without sampling, there is no soil. Without film stock, there's no reality.

Life is restless and inarticulate - offering a new definition of intelligence. Using film, video, microbes and so on, we attempt to feel the dynamic genius of life forms as they are evolving. Life forms are un-doing, de-growing and returning to matter. The human is waiting. We are merely witnessing life, but we cannot speak its language: the language of sea, soil, and cloud. All that we're capable of are cultural techniques. Sampling, exposing, gathering, layering, cultivating, voicing, spelling. Soil and film enable worlds that are unstable. Can the artist and the scientist accept instability?

Seeds of Degrowth is a research-based art project, involving performance, experimental writing, cinema and soil microbiology. I call its method "experimental ecopoetics".



Stebėtojas / The Observer by Vytautas Juozėnas, Justas Žekonis
2024,16mm, 6min.

(LT) Ore tvyro įtampa. Užuolaidų karnizo garsas primena apie kaimyną. Betono dėžučių
istorijos slepiasi po tyliais, troleibusais judančių žmonių portretais. Rytoj pereisime prie
penktos kartos ryšio.

(EN) There is tension in the air. The sound of curtain eaves reminds me of a neighbour.
The stories of the concrete boxes are hidden under the silent portraits of people moving
on trolleybuses. Tomorrow we will switch to fifth generation communication.


Audience presentation of analogue experimental films in progress by the Ecologies of Labour project 
(SPONGE) 
Yannis Proshkinas
Aleksandra Bekerytė



Dan Hermouet's super8 talk about research with "natural" materials 
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This event is part of 7th Vilnius Analog Photography and Film Festival