The 4 Ecologists

SILVIA DE GENNARO

I live and work in Rome, Italy. Since 1999 I’m founding member of Assaus Art Studio.
For twenty years I have been dealing with digital art, video art, cinema and animation.
At the beginning of my artistic career I was making installations and was painting, but in my paintings the signs that would have led me to experiment with video art could already be found.
My pictures were labyrinths, weavings, a kind of fabric that I interweaved trying to represent movement, just as the video is nothing more than a fabric of images and sounds in succession.
But it was an exhibition of Fabrizio Plessi that made me want to try, and thus I realized my first video installation. Since then, it was 2004, the passion has grown and consolidated. Every picture I see for me is a frame of a work waiting to be completed.
I love digital art, its tools do not set limits to imagination. With them you are working on the space, size, time, sound, color, and the combination of these elements can have endless variations and room for improvement.
In 2011 I started to work at my videoart project “Travel Notebooks”, a project about the cities and travel. Travel and video art have a lot in common: movement, the flow of images and events.
As of today, I realized the video of fifteen cities: Amsterdam, Perugia, Beijing, Taranto, Prague, Barcelona, Venice, Kardzhali, Bilbao, Marseille, Dubai, Cairo, Rome, Cagliari and Vienna.
My other works concern social, ecological and current affairs themes, as well as a series of videos on mythological figures and archetypes.

I have took part in more than 650 video art exhibitions and film festivals all around the world
My works have been shown in group exhibitions;
– at Contemporary Art Museums, such as:
“Triennale di Milano” (IT), “Macro” and “MAXXI”- Rome (IT), “CCCB”- Barcelona (Es), “Technopolis”- Athens (GR, “Onassis Cultural Center” – Athens (GR), “Pan” – Naples (IT) and “Museo ExTeresa Arte Actual” – Mexico City (MEX).
at many important Video Art Festivals like:
“Video Formes” (FR); “Current New Media” (U.S.A.), “F.I.L.E.” (BRA) – “Visionaria” (IT), “Madatac” (ES), “Invideo” (IT), “Visualcontainer” (IT), “Magmart” (IT), “Video Art Festival Μiden” (GR), “Athens Video Art Festival” (GR), “100×100=900“ (IT),”F.I.V.E. Feelings International Video art” (IT), “Cologne Off “ (D),.“Festival de la Imagen” (Colombia).

– at movie festivals such as: “Brooklyn Film Festival” (U.S.A.) – “ECU – European Independent Film Festival” (FR) – “Bari Film Festival” (IT) – “Los Angeles Filmforum” (U.S.A.), “I’ve Seen Films” (IT) – “Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia” Tokyo (J) -. “Internationales Trickfilm Festival” – Stuttgart (D) – “Sguardi altrove” (IT) – “Interfilm Berlino”(D) – “Nastri d’Argento” (IT).

Silvia de Gennaro
Italian videomaker

Interview with Wilfried Agricola de Cologne (The Interview Project): 10 questions

1. Tell me something about your life and the educational background
I live and work in Rome, Italy. For a long time I dedicated myself to painting and writing alternately, until I discovered that the union of the two things was the right way to express myself at the best. So I started to make videos and shorts. I have an artistic diploma, but regarding movies I’m autodidact.

2. When, how and why started you filming?
In 2004 I made my first video, it was very simple: it showed photos with sound. The video was part of an installation and talked about female creative resources.
Why did I start? I don’t know.. Perhaps because filming was what I ever wished to do.
I think that the moving is beauty, life is moving. The concept of transformation, is often present in my work. The reality isn’t objective and static but changes continuously. All is cyclical, connected and in becoming. Moreover, life, like a video, is a tissue of images and sound, and weaving is a typical female art .

3. What kind of subjects have your films?
The issues I like to represent are philosophical, spiritual and sociological, lightened by a good dose of irony.

4. How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc?
The content affects the form of my work. My films haven’t a common style, even though each has a different story. Principles and styles are a prison for creativity . For me any new work is a new experiment. Often, I use to mix animation and shooting.

5. Tell me something about the technical equipment you use.
A Canon photo camera, a Canon hd camcorder, Pc, Photoshop, After Effect, and patience.

6. What are the chances of the digital video technologies for creating art using “œmoving images” generally, and for you personally?
Before I started filming, I was a painter and was against using the pc, but when I tried it was love at first sight: digital media permitted me to experiment like I never could and, as an expressive media, it adapted to my visions magically.
Generally, digital video technologies have permitted to everybody to try to create moving art, without money too. And they gave to official Cinema means to find new expression forms, making it become attractive like it was at its beginnings.

7. How do you finance your films?
By myself

8. Do you work individually as a video artist/film maker or do you work in a team?
if you have experience in both, what is the difference, what do you prefer?
Normally, I work individually, but I’d like to work in a team. The problem is that when I’m working it’s like I’m dreaming and it’s difficult to dream and to speak with someone…

9. Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making?
Everything… I often get the idea for a film from a picture, from something I‘ve heard or saw, or from moments I’ve experienced firsthand. I seek insights and stylistic inspiration from paintings, literature, cinema, mythology and everyday news.

10. What are your future plans or dreams as a film/video maker?
I’m working at several projects… but I don’t love to talk about them before they’re completed. I’d like to make an artistic documentary, a form of art that I don’t have experienced yet.
The dream: the Oscar, obviously. I’m joking… I wish to be really satisfied of my work finally

Can works of yours viewed online besides on the CologneOFF platform? Where?
List some links & resources

https://www.assaus.it

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Click / view the video

Art Web Gallery
Silvia De Gennaro
A video artist with a very personal style, Silvia De Gennaro has increasingly oriented herself towards animation throughout her career, interpreting it in her own way, with choices ranging from 3D modeling to a sort of found footage.
The turning point of this conversion is the work ‘1907 – Joie de vivre’, created in 2013 for the international project ‘100×100=900’, designed to celebrate fifty years of video art, and of which it will become one of the most iconic works. The following year the first ‘Travel notebook’ sees the light, dedicated to Perugia, and which will open a long and successful series of notebooks.
The 13 videos in the series – the last of which, ‘Cairo’, was produced by Medrar for Contemporary Art with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo, as part of the Cairo Video Festival 10 – represent a corpus in itself in the artist’s production, not only obviously for the choice to present a city in each work, but for the particular style that characterizes them.
Made with a meticulous animation technique, attentive to every single detail, they offer a dreamlike vision of urban spaces, staged almost like an animated wunderkammer, rich in iconic and heterogeneous elements.
In his ‘Travel notebooks’, moreover, one can perceive a vaguely surreal, almost de Chirico-like atmosphere, with statues that come to life and buildings that flow like fantastic theatrical sets, while in the movements that repeatedly appear on the screen, with a certain deliberate woodenness, one even seems to trace a reflection of Chinese shadows.
Also in 2014, she created ‘My name is Franco and I like dark chocolate’ in which, in addition to the animated found footage technique, she uses 3D modeling and animation of characters.
This mix will become the stylistic hallmark of many of her videos, developed in parallel with the notebooks, and in which she will also address some contemporary social issues (‘This is not an horror movie’, ‘Home’) or mythological ones (‘Cupyd and Psyche against the black horde’, ‘Aeternus amor’, ‘Il canto del pensiero errante’ and ‘The Paradise Lost show’).
Perhaps paradigmatic is the work ‘Me_Dusa’, a self-portrait in video, in which the artist represents herself as a creature suspended between darkness and light, a dispenser of wonders but also – precisely – Medusa, a chthonic, disturbing creature, which contains within itself the contradictions of all, which the Artist always captures and represents.
Enrico Tomaselli

– Gennaro_Francesca-Piperis-on-Arte-Go

– Gennaro_books

Click the images to open the videos

Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Look Up, 2008, 6.02
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – This Summer Mosquitos Will be Worse Than Ever, 2010, 6:20
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – The days of rage, 2011, 03:00
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Rubbish world, 2012, 4:05
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Aleph, 2012,9:01
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Plancton, 2012, 3:08
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – My name is Franco and I like dark chocolate, 2014, 07:0
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – This is not a horror movie, 2014, 06:2
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Space of Memory, 2014, 623
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Home, 2016, 5:54
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Travel Notebooks: Bilbo, Bizkaia – Spain, 2017, 3:08
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Travel Notebooks: Marseille, France, 2018, 2:22
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Travel Notebooks: Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2019, 3:14
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Travel Notebooks: Rome, Italy, 2021, 4:49
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Travel Notebooks: Cairo, Egypt, 2022, 6:53
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Still Life, 2022, 03:13
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – The Shape of the Pain, 2023, 08:44
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Gaia: Uni(co)verso, 2023, 3:35
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – SPIRITUAL AI, 2024, 2:46
Silvia de Gennaro (Italy) – Damn Them All!, 2024, 2:37

Silvia de Gennaro Look Up, 2008, 6.02 Look Up, 2008, 6.02 The current lack of human values generates a superficial and egocentric society and induces to live without valuing. In other words ,without knowing how to observe and take a stand on reality. It’s necessary then to look up beyond the own borders to have a perspective and empatic vision of the world and of the others. An urban guerrilla warfare where the eyes are used as a destabilizing weapon.

Silvia de Gennaro Summer Mosquitos Will be Worse Than Ever, 2010, 6:20 This Summer Mosquitos Will be Worse Than Ever, 2010, 6:20 “This summer mosquito will be worse than ever” is an article headline. The most used words by media and politicians are: alert, danger and catastrophe. The violence wielded by an alarmist and defeatist society produces scared and secluded men who have no ambition. In the video the protagonist shelters in a garret, where she is weaving a spider web to catch the “malicious” mosquito

Silvia de Gennaro The days of rage, 2011, 03:00 The days of rage, 2011, 03:00 About the recent civil unrest in northern Africa and internet-driven uprisings against regimes in general. Animation mixed with footage from Al Jazeera

Silvia de Gennaro Rubbish world, 2012, 4:05 Rubbish world, 2012, 4:05 The world’s economy revolves around the production of waste, from consumerism that leads to a temporary use of the products, through Western civilization’s bulimic attitude towards food, down to the legal and the illegal garbage business,. “Monno Monnezza” is a kind of micro-documentary of what happens around a dumpster, there’s who takes and who throws. The movie is set in a bill of zerovalue issued by the State of Monno Monnezza.

Silvia de Gennaro Aleph, 2012,9:01 Aleph, 2012,9:01 Once upon a time, the seconds flew freely. They sprang one from another at great pace, connecting the past with the future,memories with hope. Then the time suddenly stopped and the present exploded, engulfing the past, the future, the thoughts and the words. A civilization focused only on the present ends up losing his memory and without roots can not grow. An artistic gesture, however, can save it, finding what was lost.

Silvia de Gennaro Plancton, 2012, 3:08 Plancton, 2012, 3:08 The sea, symbol of life and hope, is turning into a biological tomb. A toxic-waste dump and the dreams cemetery of those ones who looking for a better life. Into a dying sea, the aquatic organism, part of plankton, are now tiny skeletons. A fish is swimming groundlessly looking for food, the heart breaking whales’ song will go on until the end of the fish’s life.

Silvia de Gennaro My name is Franco and I like dark chocolate, 2014, 07:00 My name is Franco and I like dark chocolate, 2014, 07:00 2033: the social networks have made the Internet the place of the collective unconscious. Confused identities are lost in a shapeless global identity. The protagonist decides to disconnect from the network to find himself.

Silvia de Gennaro This is not a horror movie, 2014, 06:20 This is not a horror movie, 2014, 06:20 It’s not a horror movie but a displaying of the horror that surrounds us. Evil seems to have ousted the good from the face of the earth. Indifference is one of its manifestations, less obvious than others, but no less harmful.

Silvia de Gennaro Space of Memory, 2014, 6:23 Space of Memory, 2014, 6:23 A future -past chases and mixes itself with the current, representing past events still to happen. As in Vico’s philosophy, the recourse of history takes place when distancing from reason and memory of the past is lost. Iin an indefinite age – we’ll find out when is it just at the end – a father takes his son to visit a space” eco-gallery”, where all the evils that have destroyed their planet are shown.

Silvia de Gennaro Home, 2016, 5:54 Home, 2016, 5:54 The escape of a Syrian from the horrors of his land to the best of all possible worlds.

Silvia de Gennaro Travel Notebooks: Bilbao, Bizkaia-Spain, 2017, 3:08 Travel Notebooks: Bilbo, Bizkaia-Spain, 2017, 3:08 Futuristic architecture consisting of imaginary animals from cosmic prehistory moves in an atmosphere that combines fantasy with industry. Bilbao, a city with a strong identity, a mixture of ancient values and fascination with progress. But who really are its inhabitants ? Where do they come from?

Silvia de Gennaro Travel Notebooks: Marseille, France, 2018, 2:22 Travel Notebooks: Marseille, France, 2018, 2:22 Contemporary and vintage at the same time, dynamic and nostalgic, Marseilles is a city that reaches out to the sea, looking far into the blue distance. The protagonist is the light that appears and disappears between the clouds, intertwined with the wind and with the architecture, in a unique show of color.

Silvia de Gennaro Travel Notebooks: Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2019, 3:14 Travel Notebooks: Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2019, 3:14 Skyscrapers cells split into other skyscrapers cells and, stretching themselves along the seashore like shining cliffs of concrete and glass, compete with each other for those which touch more stars. A fragrant woman, dressed in gold and gems, leaves the house at sunset; her voice, the sweet song of the Muezzin mixed with the sound of hammers at work. She has the skin of sand and blood of oil and, as the desert has taught her, makes mirage her beauty.

Silvia de Gennaro Travel Notebooks: Rome, Italy, 2021, 4:49 Travel Notebooks: Rome, Italy, 2021, 4:49 Rome sacred and secular. A large cake with layers of artistic delights. A chaos of history, art, beauty, where time travels are made wherever you look. Rome full of birds, exotic, refined and popular. Roma Caput Mundi. My wonderful city.

Silvia de Gennaro Travel Notebooks: Cairo, Egypt, 2022, 6:53 Travel Notebooks: Cairo, Egypt, 2022, 6:5 Dust, horns, the singing of the muezzin. Ruined houses, princely palaces. Gold, marble, inlaid woods, minarets, silver domes, the mystery of the pyramids, the hypnosis of geometry. A city that whirls, men that whirl. In ecstasy. The silence of the Mosques. The peace of the Nile.	Silvia de Gennaro Still Life, 2022, 03:13 Still Life, 2022, 03:13 The death of a cut flower.
Silvia de Gennaro The Shape of the Pain, 2023, 08:44 The Shape of the Pain, 2023, 08:44 Video-performance about pain, inspired by informal art	Silvia de Gennaro Gaia: Uni(co)verso, 2023, 3:35 Gaia: Uni(co)verso, 2023, 3:35 Why look for artificial worlds when we already live in a world full of wonder?.

Silvia de Gennaro SPIRITUAL AI, 2024, 2:46 SPIRITUAL AI, 2024, 2:46 Through a dialogue with a spiritual and pacifist artificial intelligence, a military version of Ghandi slowly transforms into the Mahatma Ghandi we all know. A properly educated AI can also improve the human race.

Silvia de Gennaro Damn Them All!, 2024, 2:37 Damn Them All!, 2024, 2:37 Because of a few arrogant leaders, humanity is risking destruction.

Maria Korporal
Maria Korporal was born 1962 in Sliedrecht, the Netherlands. She studied graphics and painting at the St. Joost Academy of Fine Arts in Breda. During her studies she began working with photography and she graduated with, among other things, a video installation. After her studies, in 1986, she moved to Italy, where she returned to painting. In 1989 she founded with Gerrit Van Oord the Italian publishing house Apeiron Editori (www.apeironeditori.com), directing the production and book design. In this environment she became involved with the use of computers, and she began applying digital techniques also in her art work. Since 1998 she has dedicated herself to using mainly the new media arts for her expression.
Until 2013 she lived in Italy in Sant’Oreste (RM). Since 2014 she has lived and worked as a freelance artist and web designer in Berlin.
Maria Korporal’s artistic production includes video art, interactive projects, installations. Her multimedia work has been designed using a wide variety of techniques. The narrative aspect, both personal and social, plays a major role in her work and, together with the directness of the images and the sounds, leads to a great participation of the viewer. Her interactive installations in particular invite the viewer to participate. In her work she plays with virtuality and reality, with undergone and artificially generated experiences. Most of her projects deal with social and environmental issues, often with an ironic approach.
She is an active member of the Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists) and of the artists’ group Group Global 3000 – Art and other sustainabilities in Berlin. Her videos are distributed in Italy by VisualContainer, Milan.
Her works have been shown and awarded in various exhibitions all over the world. Among the numerous international festivals where her videos were presented: Cyland – International Media Art Festival, Digital Media Fest, FIVAC, Video Art Miden, Fest Anča, FONLAD, Food Film Fest, Madatac, Now & After, Unabhängiges Medienfestival Tübingen, WRO Media Art Biennale, InVideo, Bolzano Short Film Festival, Inheritance Festival, Instants Vidéo, Proyector, Magmart, MashRome FilmFest, Mediawave Festival, Miami New Media Festival, Strangloscope, Cyberfest, ReggioFilmFestival, The Short Nights of Berlin, Over the Real, Ibrida, Vertical Movie Festival, Videomedeja, Vierte Welle Festival.
Her website: https://www.mariakorporal.com
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Korporal

Maria Korporal
Dutch videomaker living in Berlin

Interview: 10 questions

1- Tell me something about your life and the educational background
I do not have an artistic background. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, in a working-class family not without problems. But I say this with great respect and love for my parents.
My father taught me to walk: the journey of steps. He taught me to see the miracles, large and small, that we encounter on our way.
My mother taught me to read: the journey through words. The words that lead us to worlds filled with surprises and wonders, to the infinite space within us. She was also the opposite of a classical housewife, as a child I could play as much and as I wanted, without caring about spick and span. As a child I already liked to experiment with unusual things, and I wanted to become an inventor as a grown-up.
Thus, even without knowing anything about art, my parents have had an invaluable influence on the development of my creativity.
When I chose to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, the main reason was my “capacity to draw well” – it was a naive and intuitive choice, I knew virtually nothing of the visual arts and I did not have the faintest idea what to expect. The course in graphic design and painting which I had entered was very wide and let the students free to learn about other disciplines. So, after a first period in which I developed my skill in engraving technique, I began to experiment with the base material of the etching: I let zinc and copper in acid for hours, obtaining forms that inspired me to go beyond printing them on paper. At the same time I began to work with photography, and I was particularly fascinated by moving subjects and creating sequences.
These experiments have resulted in the two projects with which I graduated: a steel sculpture, and an animated film set in a video installation.
The five years of study at the academy have been crucial to my artistic development.

2- When, how and why started you filming?
As I told before, I made my first film while I was a graduate student at the Academy of Arts. This film was entitled “Joy to the World” and had a strong anti-war content – an ironic comment on militarism. I made it almost entirely with stop-motion animation, recorded on 16 mm film, mounted by hand and then reversed on video tape.
Immediately after graduating in 1986 I moved to Italy. I wanted to continue with film and video, but I did not have the material resources. So I returned to engraving and painting, but this was very useful for my artistic development anyway. I also had a small photo lab at my disposal and experimented a lot with the various disciplines. In 1990 I founded, together with my partner, the publishing house Apeiron Editori, and in this environment I became involved with the use of computers. In subsequent years, slowly my artistic work became more digital, but it was only in 2003 until I had the necessary equipment to restart with video art – and once started, I could not stop anymore and I have created one video after another until nowadays. I have not the slightest desire to work with other disciplines such as painting or graphics.
I still have a copy of my first video “Joy to the World” on U-matic tape, and recently I’m trying to convert it to a digital file. So far I have not found a laboratory that can do it, but I have not lost hope. If I will manage to convert the video, I will put it online, and it will have a place of honor on my website!

3- What kind of subjects have your films?
My films deal with several subjects. When I am invited to participate in a project with a certain theme, I usually see this as a nice challenge, and often I become enthusiastic and I manage to develop some good ideas. But most of the time the subjects for my videos come from myself, and it is difficult to say how they originate; sometimes it is a slowly growing process, other times a rapid inspiration.
Since 2009 I am working on the project Korporal Zoo, a series of videos that deal with the relationship between animals and humans from different perspectives – cultural, social, environmental. At the moment of this interview six episodes have been published in Korporal Zoo, plus the prelude “Passing By” and the interlude “. unending . “. You can see the online versions of all videos on the dedicated Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/channels/korporalzoo
The last episode in Korporal Pictures is the video “Nevermore”, which I finished on December 1st, 2012: https://vimeo.com/54654894.
I got the first idea for the video in January 2003, so it took me almost ten years to complete it – but it was not a linear journey on a single path, I walked on many paths instead, often interrupted; several times I got distracted and took roads that led me to other places. To put it in more concrete terms: during the past ten years I have repeatedly tried to go ahead with the project “Nevermore”, but during the work in progress it has always evolved into another direction and has become another work.
I would like to mention two of these works in particular: “Made on Earth” and “Timelines”. Practically they deal with the same theme of “Nevermore”: human violence, but the three works present different points of view.
In the video “Made on Earth” the artist is the one who walks and looks, but remains invisible, she is not integrated in the story ( https://vimeo.com/9977848 ). In the photographic installation “Timelines” instead, self-portraits of the artist are flanked by public domain images of people who suffer from violence. Here empathy is introduced, but there is always the division between the artist and the rest of the world ( http://www.mariakorporal.com/timelines-en.php?recordID=129 ). In the video “Nevermore” the artist is finally integrated in the story, she is a victim and culprit at the same time, she takes the human responsibility for violence and pronounces the promise “nevermore”, while she is always aware of human weakness.
I deliberately use the word “artist” and not “I”. I am nothing but a speck of nature … while creating art, the artist must be detached from the ego.

4- How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc?
My ideas and inspirations come from everything I meet on my way. Each film is always a new adventure; a blank sheet. I do not follow certain principles or styles, but of course I am influenced constantly by the things I see and experience: nature, people and relationships, music and literature, works by other video artists, and also my own work. I examine my previous works always very carefully, and I often re-use certain elements in newer contexts, with more or less variations. Each of my works originates from earlier experiences, but is at the same time open to the new things I find along my way. Each of my works is a journey and a re-birth.

5- Tell me something about the technical equipment you use.
I use both videocamera and photocamera to get my footage, which I edit in Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro. For the sounds I have a sound recorder and an Apple keyboard which I use with several plugins and soundfonts.
The editing is fundamental for the biggest part of my works. Until 2008 I did not even have a videocamera, I used still images and digital photomontages, which I processed with several animation techniques. In my more recent films I combine moving footage with still images and animation.

6- What are the chances of the digital video technologies for creating art using “moving images” generally, and for you personally?
The new media and the quick development of computer technology has changed the genre film/video in an incisive way. Nowadays it is possible to produce a film or video without an expensive equipment and in relatively short terms. For me personally this has been of essential importance, because in this way I am able to make film and video on my own, as an individual art form.

7- How do you finance your films?
I always work with very elementary media, so I finance my films by myself. A potent computer, videocamera, photocamera, tripod, sound recorder and lots of ideas & energy are enough to make a good video … since I do all technical details (montage, effects, ecc.) by myself, I do not need to pay people or laboratories. But in the near future I do not exclude projects which would have to be financed by third parties.

8- Do you work individually as a video artist/film maker or do you work in a team?
if you have experience in both, what is the difference, what do you prefer?
I am very individualistic and tend to do everything alone. But over the years I became also attracted to the idea of working together, and in 2006 I started my first artistic collaboration with a friend, the sculptor Marina Buening, under the name of Zweiart. Our works are visible on the site http://www.zweiart.eu/
Afterwards I did several other works in collaboration with various people, especially poets and musicians, as you can see when you look through the video page on my site www.mariakorporal.com/video-en.php
I’m a lone wolf, and every time when I start a journey in company I feel insecure … but it does not last long, fears and doubts are soon replaced by enthusiasm; it is really a wonderful thing to create and develop a project with other people.
In my opinion, a frequent mistake in artistic collaborations is making a work of which you are not convinced. Sure, you can create something for friendship and the joy of being together, in this case collaboration is more important than the artistic quality of the work, and you need to be aware of this. It becomes a game that can result in a splendid work, or in a mediocre product. But when the principal purpose of the collaboration is the creation of a work of art, I am self-critical in the same way when I do my individual projects. We should be honest and transparent, and be able to express our doubts and insecurities. I have learned to communicate well, but that does not mean that the error will not happen again – every situation is different, and my motto is “I always learn, and I never learn.”
I worked more often with women than with men. The idea of innate rivalry and envy between women is commonplace unfortunately accepted by many men and women. Of course envy and rivalry exist, but my personal experience is not like this, so far I have always worked beautifully and harmoniously with other women, there is a lot of solidarity and understanding. Women are excellent traveling companions.
I absolutely do not like to divide humanity into a male part and a female – I feel androgynous to the bone. But society imposes the difference on us, and to be born a girl means to fight all your life. I strongly believe in solidarity between women, as you can see in my video “The Waltz”: https://vimeo.com/16113599
So I work sometimes individually, sometimes in a team, and I cannot say which of the two I prefer, depends on the time and situation.

9- Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making?
My way of life is the most influential on my film/video making. I would like to work full-time on my videos, but I have to do a lot of other things to earn my money (just enough to live, I do not want to be rich). However these are all self-employed jobs, which allow me to organize my days in an efficient way, and to create the necessary space and time to work on my videos. “Stealing moments” I always say to myself – I steal moments from everyday life, moments that can last half an hour, but also a whole week, in which I dedicate myself to my art and nothing else.
Sport, or rather physical movement is essential – I love mountain biking, but my true passion is running (which I do every day), and also long walks (when I have more time). Always in the open air, on the beautiful trails in the area where I live. I am lucky to live in a beautiful place at the foot of Mount Soratte, north of Rome, with a generally pleasant climate. When I run or walk I reach the maximal feeling of freedom: I feel liberated from the weight of materia and from the self. These are the moments in which ideas come to live, and enthusiasm and happiness for these ideas increase my energy even more – in short, practicing sports in nature is crucial for my creative process. But the most important of all things is desire. Desire is the fundamental driving power of my creativity.
In this context I would like to quote David Lynch, an artist that I admire:
“Desire for an idea is like bait. When you’re fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in – those ideas. The beautiful thing is when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish – a fragment of an idea – that fish will draw in other fish, and they’ll hook onto it. Then you’e on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.
(David Lynch, Deep Waters)

10- What are your future plans or dreams as a film/video maker?
Future plans or dreams? That is not an easy question to answer; when I work on a project, I usually feel myself deep inside it, and I live in a constantly here & now.
In these days however I am in a transitional phase. I just finished three important works of which I am satisfied: “Nevermore”, “The god is dead, long live …” and “Specchiatura”, and now I am preparing myself to a new work, or better: I have to choose which project to continue. It is not that I make my videos one after the other; in fact there are many ideas, often developed to a certain point. When I want to pick up the thread of a work in progress, my notebooks are always very useful.
For many years I keep a notebook in which I write notes and sketches. Meanwhile I have a very large collection and there are times, like now, where I wander in my previous notebooks. It is always interesting and leads me to new visions, I understand better why some works have been created at certain times in my life, and I re-discover various ideas forgotten and never developed. I am currently in a period like that.
At the same time I also welcome what I find on my way – in this period I am very fascinated by the Inuit culture and I’m re-reading Marguerite Yourcenar, especially what she wrote about nature, are very taken by the music of Luigi Nono and Horatiu Radulescu; and there are the inspirations born from meetings and from the things I observe around me, and a thousand memories, dreams and thoughts that come and go …

Can works of yours viewed online besides on the CologneOFF platform? Where?
List some links & resources

My own website:
http://www.mariakorporal.com

Click the images to open the videos

Maria Korporal Installation 1 Video documentary on the augmented reality video installation “Qlimate Qronobot. AI and the Future of Our Planet” by Maria Korporal.

Maria Korporal Installation 2 My interactive installation consists in a monitor with a video of the world map with all airplanes flying in this moment, generated from a real-time radar view. In front of the monitor there is a small tree trunk. Moving it you fill the surface of the world with growing trees, while the airplanes disappear slowly – the more you move the tree trunk, the more the earth becomes green and the less becomes the air traffic. We’re in the middle of a global tourism boom. Worldwide, more than 1.4 billion people now travel internationally every year, up from 500 million trips in 1995. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) predicts that figure will reach or exceed 1.8 billion by 2030. The tourism boom brings economic growth, but the damages are severe, especially from an ecological point of view. Almost all cheap international mass travels are flights. It is alarming when you realize how many airplanes are in the air right now and how much CO2 is emitted every moment. With my little tree trunk I invite the spectators to stand stil for just a while and reflect about this boom. When they move the trunk, they let trees travel all over the world, interrupt the constant air traffic and make the air brighter. It’s time we become aware of what trees mean to our earthly life. We can hardly do anything better than planting trees to help to save the future of this planet.

Maria Korporal Installation 3 Breathearth, 2018 Short film about the project Breathearth by Maria Korporal, with the two versions Breathearth Building (for large projection) and Breathearth (for monitor). Breathearth is an interactive installation made with a Raspberry Pi, a small earth globe and a projector. Visitors are invited to take the small globe in their hands and gently blow on it. With every breath flowers and leaves appear on a surface or an object until it is covered with colour and life. Every new session presents other combinations of vegetation and it is a surprise to see what flowers one has created by breathing. When breathing is interrupted, you’ll note that after just a while the natural vegetation disappears: the earth cannot survive without our breath! Breathearth is a work in progress. Several versions have already been created, for screens of different sizes and for large projections, with different backgrounds, leaves and flowers.

Maria KorporalInstallation 4 Lecture and work show on sustainability and art Video recording of the online multimedia lecture by Maria Korporal on March 18, 2021, as part of a workshop series organized by SocialArt e.V., Kulturmühle Lietzen. The conference is in German language. The artist tells about her way of working and she shows her works – Passing By – Desert Tree – Give Us Back Our Shadows – Underwater Desert – Among the Leaves – Rekall – Breathearth – Tree Travelling – Emergency Call Center – Thinking with my Knee – and some collaborative projects and activities.

Maria Korporal Installation 5 Emergency Call Center an interactive videoinstallation by Maria Korporal The installation is composed of an old telephone from the DDR connected to two Raspberry Pies with interactive functions and two video loops on a small and e larger screen, a stone, a bluetooth speaker and a large projection of the video Emergency Call. Extreme climatological events, which take place all over the world, should be a warning sign to large industry and governments. My hope is that humanity will respond to Earth’s emergency call and not let the phone rust in the water.

18 January – 1 March 2025

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Click the images to open the videos

Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – The Waltz, 2010, 3:11
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Midwinter Night’s Dream, 2010, 3:37
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Desert Tree, 2010, 1:38
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Avgerinos & Poulia, 2011, 657
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – [Naked], 2012, 4:01
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – … in-volo-quadrato …, 2012, 2:12
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Nevermore, 2012, 10:27
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Third Eye Flying, 2014 , 4:54
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Anne Frank, 2014 , 6:20
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Give us back our shadows, 2014 , 6:45
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Stay or fly away?, 2015, 0:49
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Underwater Desert, 2015, 2:35
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Breaking Borders, 2017, 5:36
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Emergency Call, 2019, 5:19
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – The First After-Corona Kiss, 2020, 4:05
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Thinking with my Knee, 2021, 1:43
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Breathing Bags 2021, 3:18
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Wandel, 2022, 3:38
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – The Mind’s Egg, 2023, 2:30
Maria Korporal (Netherlands) – Diaspora, 2023, 5:57

Maria Korporal The Waltz, 2010, 3:11 The Waltz, 2010, 3:11 The video is part of the project Korporal Zoo, a series of short movies which deal with the relationship between animals and human beings studied from several prospectives: cultural, social, environmental. In The Waltz appear birds flying freely, and a couple of women (they can be sisters, friends, lovers) closed in a cage, who dance an endless waltz. At the end they manage to liberate themselves… The video has a clear reference to gender issues and women’s emancipation.

Maria Korporal Midwinter Night's Dream, 2010, 3:37 Midwinter Night’s Dream, 2010, 3:37 The artist portraits herself sleeping in a warm and cosy ambient near the fireplace with the cat purring. She falls into a dream in which she seems to experience a rebirth. A flamingo with its head in the water moves in concentric circles creating a whirlpool. Struggling with her arms and legs, the artist finally manages to emerge.

Maria Korporal Desert Tree, 2010, 1:38 Desert Tree, 2010, 1:38 Desert Tree is based on a Mongolian legend about camels: Many years ago, God gave antlers to the camel, as a reward for the goodness of its heart. But one day a rogue deer came and asked the camel to lend him his antlers. He wanted to adorn himself with them for a celebration in the west of the country. The camel trusted the deer and gave him his antlers. But the deer never brought them back. Since then, the camels keep gazing at the horizon and still await the deer’s return..

Maria Korporal Avgerinos & Poulia, 2011, 6:57 Avgerinos & Poulia, 2011, 6:57 Avgerinos & Poulia, a film by Maria Korporal with music by Sofia Koubli, inspired on a Greek fairytale. According to Greek tradition, the story developes itself from a red string which transforms continuously, appears, disappears and re-appears again, and leads the protagonists along the way of the tale – to grow finally into a constellation tree and give birth to the two luminous stars of brother and sister Avgerinos and Poulia.

Maria Korporal Naked, 2012, 4:01 Naked, 2012, 4:01 The video is the fruit of an encounter between a poet and a visual artist. Along the pathway of life, they share their stories, and open up different spaces and times. The images and sounds are born of a stone, discovered in the dry grass: it takes on life in the hand of the artist. The poem was written specially for the video and is published here for the first time. { naked } — because, as poet Daìta Martinez says, stone is naked. We have only to open it for it to come out, alive.

Maria Korporal … in-volo-quadrato ..., 2012, 2:12 … in-volo-quadrato …, 2012, 2:12 “Attempt to form squares instead of circles around a stone falling into water” and “Attempt to fly”, two works by Gino De Dominicis from 1969, inspired Maria Korporal in her performance in this video. Defying the laws of gravity, the artist tries to immerse herself in the immortality so much longed for by De Dominicis.

Maria Korporal Nevermore, 2012, 10:27 Nevermore, 2012, 10:27 Why do humans do themselves harm? Why do they destroy the nature they are part of? These are the questions that the artist, as part of humankind, asks herself, through a variety of expressive spaces and languages including performances, fragments of historical films and animated drawings on paper. The whispers of “nevermore” pronounced by the artist and transformed into voices both feminine and masculine make us think of a promise sealed with a kiss – a promise that takes wing and is carried off by the wind.

Maria Korporal Third Eye Flying, 2014 , 4:54 Third Eye Flying, 2014, 4:54 In this video, the artist acts with what she calls her “third eye”: a small video camera attached to her forehead. On the runway of the historical airport Tempelhof in Berlin she takes off and flies into outer space. We see what she sees through her third eye, as she reaches the area of which Man Ray spoke about in his “Pepys Diary” (1959): “Somewhere in outer space the images of the entire history of mankind travel on the airwaves

Maria KorporalAnne Frank, 2014 , 6:20 Anne Frank, 2014 , 6:20 The film has been created on the piece of music “Anne Frank” by Shiri Malckin, with Nina Maroccolo reading from her book “Annelies Marie Frank”: “I blossomed as a woman at Prinsengracht 263 on 4 August 1944, when the Dutch Nazi police captured me shamelessly alive among the unmade beds…” – Footage has been taken mostly in nowadays Berlin: ex-concentration camp Sachsenhausen, and the city panorama seen from the Fernsehturm. Memory of the earth…

Maria Korporal Give us back our shadows, 2014 , 6:45 Give us back our shadows, 2014 , 6:45 “An old Native American legend tells that an insect stole the shadow to those who did not respect nature. Deprived, in this way, of their soul, the men became ill. Only with music and singing they were able to finally get their shadow back and live happily ever after.”

Maria Korporal Stay or fly away?, 2015, 0:49 Stay or fly away?, 2015, 0:49 One of the most neglected aspects about refugees is that they are in a situation of emergency in which they have to take a decision immediately, and whatever they decide, there is no turning back. Just as the butterfly in this video: “Fourteen seconds to decide, will you stay or fly away?” Whether the butterfly decides to stay or to fly, the circle closes anyway and takes away any possibility to go back on the tracks.

Maria Korporal Underwater Desert, 2015, 2:35 Underwater Desert, 2015, 2:35 If the soul is a flame, how many candles should light up the oceans where nuclear waste is killing all living creatures? “There is a silence where hath been no sound, There is a silence where no sound may be, In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea.” These words by Thomas Hood are read by Shiri Malckin, over and over again, in her musical piece “Underwater Desert” which forms the soundtrack of the video.

Maria Korporal Breaking Borders, 2017, 5:36 Breaking Borders, 2017, 5:36 The video “Breaking Borders” is the evolution of my interactive installation “Die Grenzen der Sprache”, which I presented in April-May 2017 as part of the exhibition “Update 17” in Gallery VBK, Berlin. The work presents the statement “Die Grenzen der Sprache sind die Grenzen der Welt” by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The German word “Grenzen” has a double meaning and the phrase can be translated in two ways: “The Limits of Language are the Limits of the World” or “The Borders of Language are the Borders of the World”.

Maria Korporal Emergency Call, 2019, 5:19 Emergency Call, 2019, 5:19 While the summer in Berlin in 2018 was the hottest and driest in the whole history, the month of July 2017 had brought us only heavy rain. The Landwehrkanal emerged from the banks, basements overflowed. Extreme climatological events, which take place all over the world, should be a warning sign to large industry and governments. My hope is that humanity will respond to Earth’s emergency call and not let the phone rust in the water.

Maria Korporal The First After-Corona Kiss, 2020, 4:05 The First After-Corona Kiss, 2020, 4:05 “This summer mosquito will be worse than ever” is an article headline. The most used words by media and politicians are: alert, danger and catastrophe. The violence wielded by an alarmist and defeatist society produces scared and secluded men who have no ambition. In the video the protagonist shelters in a garret, where she is weaving a spider web to catch the “malicious” mosquito

Maria Korporal Thinking with my Knee, 2021, 1:43 Thinking with my Knee, 2021, 1:43 During a walk in the streets of Beuys‘ city Düsseldorf, I photographed a piece of rubbish sitting on the asphalt. Later I anthropomorphised and animated it, using charcoal drawing. It changed into a spontaneously created microcosm.Transforming the waste by using associative drawing, I want to make it clear that mankind is destroying his environment. He possesses, fortunately, also a strong creative power, which he can use to improve the world and shape the future. To quote Joseph Beuys: “The only revolutionary force is the force of human creativity.”

Maria Korporal Breathing Bags 2021, 3:18 Breathing Bags 2021, 3:18 Breathing Bags are plastic bags with rubbish found on the streets, which inflate and explode with breathing movements and sounds. One-way plastic bags are so ubiquitous in the street scene that we no longer even notice them. By watching them explode, we become aware of how much plastic is flying around and how microplastic particles pollute our air. The short film is a hybrid mix of digital and analogue animation, and shows some street scenes in Berlin, while the Breathing Bags explode. A single paper bag comes to life and transforms into a scene full of surprises. A glimmer of hope for our world.

Maria Korporal Wandel, 2022, 3:38 Wandel, 2022, 3:38 The title of this video WANDEL, translated CHANGE, may have at least two possible meanings. The first concerns climate change, the second and connected are the social and cultural changes we have to undertake to avoid a global environmental crisis, caused by climate change. The Austrian poet Erich Fried wrote in 1981: „Wer will, dass die Welt bleibt, wie sie ist, will nicht, dass sie bleibt.“ (Those who want the world to remain as it is, do not want it to remain). This is a timeless statement. It is written at my feet on an infinite asphalt planet, and I stand there with my bicycle. When I begin cycling, the planet starts moving itself and while rotating a transformation is taking place. One sees animated images emerge. They suggest alternative energies and evolve into breathing life forms. The world is revitalized, the asphalted planet begins blooming again!

Maria Korporal The Mind’s Egg, 2023, 2:30 The Mind’s Egg, 2023, 2:30 The metaphore of the mind’s egg refers to some of the highly estimated potentialities of the human mind that we know as creativity, innovation, and originality. Just like an egg contains the genetic material and nutrients necessary for the growth of a new organism, the mind’s egg contains the ideas and fundamentals, knowledge and experiences that may give birth to inventions, new insights or new art forms. I had these ideas in mind when I began working on this video. I started with a 3D animated egg and then continued with an animated chalk drawing on a blackboard. The drawn figures seem to come out of the egg, but at the same time they nest the egg in a protected environment. When the drawing is completed, the egg and the figures undergo a transformation. The result is a dynamic digital microcosmos.

Maria Korporal Diaspora, 2023, 5:57 Diaspora, 2023, 5:57 The visual narrative of the video is formed by laying down stones. From this act emerge animated shapes and drawings. At the same time words appear in the screen, beginning with DIASPORA, replaced initially by negative concepts like XENOPHOBIA and DIATRIBE, but then words like DIALOGUE and RESPECT take the place of the negative ones. However, DIASPORA may suddenly reappear. Flows of refugees are going on everywhere in the world and often cause sharp conflicts and racism. And yet an idea always returns and reconfirms itself: LOVE – the universal value that connects people – with which the video ends.

Susanne Wiegner
https://www.susannewiegner.de
Susanne Wiegner studied architecture at the Academy of fine Arts in Munich and at Pratt Institute in New York City. She works as an architect and 3D-artist in Munich, Germany. In addition to projects in real space, for several years she has been creating 3D computer animations dealing with literature and with virtual space. Venues where her work have been shown include the Pinakothek der Moderne and Künstlerverbund at Haus der Kunst in Munich, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Art + Technology Center EYEBEAM in New York City, FACT in Liverpool, FILE in Sao Paulo, Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, WRO Biennale in Wroclaw, National Gallery of Art in Vilnius re-new, digital art festival in Copenhagen, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Les Rencontres International, Paris/Berlin, EMAF, Osnabrück, Videonale 16, Kunsthalle, Bonn and festivals in Marseille, Rotterdam, Berlin, Athens, Lisbon, Toulouse, New Delhi, Damascus, Beirut, Vienna, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Macau, London etc.
In 2011 her film “just midnight” was the winner of the festival award “la parola immaginata” in Bergamo, Italy and in 2012 her film “at the museum” won the Ballon- Prize at crosstalk VideoArtFestival 2012, Budapest, Hungary. In 2014, her film “Love in the Age of the EU” was selected as one the best three films of ZEBRA Poem 2014, Berlin. In 2015 her film “the light – the shade” was the winner of the international competition at CYCLOP, Videopoetry Festival, Kiev, Ukraine and received the second place at FILE ANIMA+ Award 2016. In 2020 her poetry film “contemplation is watching” won First Prize in the Atticus Review Videopoem Contest, USA and in 2021 her film “ruhwunsch” based on a poem by Antonio Fian won the Special Award at Art Visuals and Poetry Filmfestival 2021, Vienna, Austria

Artist Statement

I came to 3D computer animation in the field of architecture to visualize spaces and taught myself the corresponding computer programs. For this reason, my main focus is on space. I do not work with figures in the field of animation, which is unusual, because viewers easily relate to animated characters. I try to create suspense and emotionality through spaces, objects or certain atmospheres, colours, light and shade. I like to work with a single camera move without visible cuts. Every scene arises from the previous one as a continuous journey through time and space. In my films you can never be sure where you are. The construction of parallel worlds, which are exclusively imaginable in the virtual world and which are based on literature and the combination of past and present ideas, of fears, dreams and future visions is one of my main issues.
My films reflect a certain aesthetics, which is rooted in poetry and a minimalist, melancholic visual language. The permanent blending of reality and fiction of memory and imagination of consciousness and subconsciousness is a central theme in my work.

Susanne Wiegner
German filmmaker

Interview:10 questions

*1. Tell me something about your life and the educational background*
I have studied interior design and architecture at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich and at Pratt Institute in New York.

*2. When, how and why started you filming?*
When I learned to handle different CAD software, I was fascinated by the possibilities of creating 3d-worlds. So I started to visualize my ideas by virtual movements through spaces and buildings.

*3. What kind of subjects have your films?*
The transformation of literature, memories or thoughts into virtual spaces by keeping the balance among fantastic and realistic components. I like the combination of past and present ideas.

*4. How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc?*
Usually I start with an idea and concept but somehow each film project becomes an adventurous expedition. I intend to create animated films, that don’t imitate the reality as accurately as possible, but reflects a certain self-contained virtual aesthetics, which is not rooted in any elaborated technique but in poetry or creative spirit. I prefer a minimalist style.

*5. Tell me something about the technical equipment you use.*
Blender, Magix

*6. What are the chances of new media for the genre film/video in general* *and you personally?*
Everybody is able to visualize his ideas and publish them online without the need of galleries, museums and cinemas.
For me it means a certain independence because I don’t need a crew or a big budget to create and distribute my films.*

7. How do you finance your films?*
self-financed*

8. Do you work individually as a video artist/film maker or do you work in a team? if you have experience in both, what is the difference, what do you prefer?*
Concerning my films, I have no experiences in teamwork, but I guess it is both, inspiring and stressful. As I am very flexible not only in developing my projects but also in my working process, I prefer working individually at the moment.*

9. Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making?*
Literature (Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne …). Old silent movies like “le voyage dans la lune” by George Méliès or the old Twilight Zone episodes.*

10. What are your future plans or dreams as a film/video maker?*
That I will always get enough time and money to create my animated films and that they will receive a worldwide audience.*
*
Can works of yours viewed online besides on VideoChannel? Where?
List some links & resources

my website
https://www.susannewiegner.de

– Wiegner_Munich_2023

– Wiegner_Interview_ Poetry

Susanne Wiegner
Contribution for the book “The Poetics of Poetry Film”
published in the UK and in the USA in 2021 by Intellect Ltd

I remember very well the day in the year 1999 when I saw the video installation Three Windows – a Tribute to Robert Lax by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. I had never heard of Robert Lax before – one of the most important representatives of minimal poetry in the United States. He spent a large part of his life on the Greek Island of Patmos, almost like an hermit, where Humbert and Penzel frequently visited him with their cameras. They used the interviews, video and sound material for their film triptych. I was immediately fascinated by the poems, the voice, the person, the landscape and the direct living surroundings of Robert Lax. This remarkable coherence between life, artist and work inspired me so much that I visited the exhibition several times. This experience proved to be decisive for my work on poetry films.

I studied interior design and architecture at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich and at Pratt Institute in New York City. During my studies in the 1980s, computer software was not in use, but I was very interested in different techniques to visualise space. To start off with, I drew a series of perspectives and isometric views, later I created little boxes in which I experimented with the way light falls on and reflects back from different materials. I started working with computer software in the late 1990s as an architect and taught myself various 3D programs because I was very much intrigued by the possibilities to visualise spaces, objects in spaces or atmospheres formed by light and shadow. It is in this context that I created my first camera movement through a building to convey my ideas of architecture to clients.

Originally, I was not a reader of lyrics, but loved to read prose. I realised that I was attracted by the subject of space, especially in the texts of Franz Kafka. Reading about his writing difficulties in his diaries, culminating in the exclamation “Qualen der Wohnung.
Grenzenlos.”, I felt addressed as an architect to develop a virtual space in which Franz Kafka might have written his kind of literature. I started researching all passages about space in his writings as a basis for my designing process. I was so enthralled by this project that I ended up creating ten writing rooms for deceased poets. For example an elevator for Robert Musil, an UFO for Heinrich von Kleist or a tree house for Bettine von Arnim. The project premiered as a lecture performance with actors in 2002. This was my first step into the area of poetry film because I realised that I had found the ideal way to combine the two things I like to deal with, namely literature and creating virtual spaces; and I like the process of combining ideas from the past with present-day techniques of visualisation.

My first independent film project was the visualisation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis with the help of a virtual space model in which the story plays. The film was part of the exhibition Architektur wie sie im Buche steht at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2006/07. Next I created a film about Kafka’s room, as he described it in his diary on the 4th of October 1911 at a certain time in the twilight with changing colours, shadows and light incidents.

Turning to poetry film was, in a way, the next logical step because of poetry’s tendencies towards brevity, linguistic condensation and abstraction.

Over the years, I often thought about my experience at the Haus der Kunst and, reading that Robert Lax was a friend of some representatives of minimal art, like Ad Reinhardt, – an art movement, that I admire too – I became interested in Lax’s poems again.

On the one hand, I like the subject of his poems, the description of everyday moments that make up our lives, but which we rarely consciously perceive and, on the other hand, I am attracted by the vertical typeface that was developed by Robert Lax to force the reader to slow down and pay attention to the process of reading.

I used the vertical sequence of letters and syllables for my first poetry film just midnight in which I work without voice-over. Robert Lax describes just a short moment round midnight when it starts raining. I was particularly interested in the transformation of time. The very short moment, actually the blink of an eye, which is deepened and stretched by poetic means.

In the meantime, I have created five films based on poems by Robert Lax. In all of these films I work more or less with the typeface, which I set in the third dimension and which is no longer a pure carrier of information, but also the medium of my own associations and turns into spaces, architecture, landscape or projection surface. In this way, I expand the condensed language into my own world of images and work against the linguistic reduction of Robert Lax.

All five films end up on a piece of paper. This is my personal tribute to this medium, which has accompanied us in a most reliable way through all the centuries and whose reliability I have come to appreciate greatly, especially since working digitally.

I do not work with figures in the field of 3D computer animation, which is unusual, because viewers easily relate to animated characters. Trained as an architect I try to create suspense and emotionality through spaces, objects or certain atmospheres, colours, light and shade. When I start with a poetry film I watch out for peculiarities in type or layout of the poem.

I like to work with a single camera move, without cuts and I develop the various spatial changes out of the scenery, because that is the best way to create certain moments of surprise for the audience. This is, of course, very complex and requires, for some films, to work backwards. In my films, you can never be sure where you are. Such as in the film Kaspar Hauser Lied based on the poem by Georg Trakl. At first sight, the film seems to play in a kind of labyrinth, but the viewer comes to realise at the end that the labyrinth is the inscription on Kaspar Hauser’s gravestone. This film shows in exemplary fashion, what fascinates me about poetry. Over time, the figure of Kaspar Hauser has become ever more mysterious and incomprehensible through the many interpretations and speculations it has triggered. Yet Georg Trakl suggests, by means of poetry and by poetic means, that the person behind, with his desires and fears, is just a human being like anybody else.

I have come to realise that the film makers, whom I admire, also work with long camera moves: Orson Welles’ first scene in Touch of Evil or Stanley Kubrick in Shining as well as Wim Wenders, whose first scene in Der Himmel über Berlin is a poetry film based on the poem Als das Kind Kind war by Peter Handke. I love Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkowksi with the static camera settings or the surreal spaces of the dream sequence of Salvador Dali in Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

The play of light and shadow is very important in my films. In the initial scene of the light – the shade based on the poem by Robert Lax, when the camera goes from the street into the room, I use 20 different sources of light to create the specific atmosphere I wish to convey.

Light is probably so important to me, because, growing up in a small village near the Bavarian Alps in the 1960s, – of course without computer or even TV – light had a very magical meaning, which I could hardly resist as a child, particularly in the long and snowy winters of the time. I remember vividly the lights around Christmas time or the light projected onto the dark walls by the few passing cars. These motifs arise repeatedly in my works.

I also recollect staring at the label of a lemonade bottle picturing a boy, who holds a bottle on which he himself is pictured holding a bottle, and so on, a so-called mise en abyme, a picture in the picture. I was fascinated by a sudden feeling of infinity. This topic appears very often in my films. I create not only poetry films, but also film projects on the subjects of space, time and memory. I think that I am always looking for these contemplative moments in my films, when one suddenly notices that imaginary spaces open up behind the pictures.

Before I start with a film, I like to be inspired by paintings, like Goya’s black paintings, by René Magritte’s The Empire of Light, paintings by Caravaggio or Edward Hopper or the atmosphere in the romantic landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich. I usually spend a great part of the summer in the mountains, without computers or internet, focused on taking in the landscape and nature with their many changing colours and moods. Later I try to translate these impressions into the atmosphere of my videos. I very much appreciate the descriptions of landscapes by Adalbert Stifter as they consist of a second emotional and sensual level, that I attempt to transfer to my virtual spaces. I use colours rather restrainedly, which is due to the fact that I feel generally more appealed bymelancholic
moods. In terms of pure technique, my animations are more minimalist in comparison to the usual 3D computer animations which try to imitate reality as exactly as possible.

I do not interpret poems theoretically. I begin my film projects without having a concrete concept, usually I start with a spontaneous visual idea. In the light – the shade my initial

idea was to melt the words red, blue, white and black into a painting. Then I planned the film as a journey from my working table to this key scene and back again following the poem and the rhythm of Robert Lax’s voice. I do not work with a storyboard. All my ideas arise while working on the computer. It is almost like an expedition into the unknown when I start working on a new film project. I have expressed this feeling in the light – the shade with the sequence when the camera enters the screen of the laptop and leads into a space formed by letters. As I work with 3D animation I have the advantage that I can build the world that I like to film myself. Then I start to explore the spaces, as for example the three- dimensional letters with the camera with exciting insights. In this way I develop scene by scene. Working on a film is very time-intensive as I do everything myself from design to editing. A five-minute- film takes me three or four months.

Poetry itself is a very free art form since it is not really bound by rules. Language as material is able to create specific images for every reader or listener and sets in motion a very individual process of associations, which is also not bound by any rules and disappears and arises again and again. There is this wonderful word in German: Kopfkino.
A poetry film necessarily restricts this freedom, since it interprets the poem by means of specific images. What I am looking for with my poetry films is to discover and feel, even for a few brief moments, something that goes beyond the poem, something that opens up new spaces behind the screen or the world as I know it. In fact, I am constantly looking for these very unique and intense instants.

– Wiegner_Looking_Glass_Catalogue-27emes-Rencontres-2024.pdf

– Wiegner_reset-now_HausDerKunst

– Wiegner_backdrop_Katalog_25RIT-2022

18 January – 1 March 2025

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Click the images to open the videos

Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Imagines et loci, 2009, 11:57
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Just Midnight, 2010, 3:43
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – At the Museum, 2012, 3:00
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – my homeland – meine heimat, 2012, 1:33
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Inside My Room, 2013, 3:26
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – the light – the shade, 2014, 7:07
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Home, Sweet Home!, 2014, 2:59
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Future in the Past, 2015, 7:07
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Contemplation is Watching, 2016, 6:08
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – noctilucent, 2017, 06:12
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Melting Fields, 2018, 8:16
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – soliloquy, 2018, 5:55
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Abysm, 2018, 6:20
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) . Sunrise, 2019, 5:46
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Listen, 2019, 3:20
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Bellevue, 2020, 7:00
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Yesterdays Tomorrow Morning, 2021, 8:09
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Back drop, 2021, 4:03
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – When Wishing, 2022, 8:15
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Looking Glass, 2023, 7:00

Susanne Wiegner Imagines et loci, 2009, 11:57 Imagines et loci, 2009, 11:57 Old family photos and the ticking of a clock evoke a process of remembrance that deals with the spacial fading of remembered reality and visualised possibility. The child enters the grandparent’s house, a very strict, religious and proper world, embedded into a chronologically controlled daily routine. .

Susanne Wiegner Just Midnight, 2010, 3:43 Just Midnight, 2010, 3:43 “just midnight” is a poem by Robert Lax, which conveys a temporal and spatial momentary mood with very minimal means. In his texts, it was important to Robert Lax how the letters and words are set on the paper and so one of his typical, vertical typefaces was created here, which was adopted for the film. The letters become spaces, actors, which the camera paces through and circles around. Gradually a three-dimensional word structure emerges in front of the beholder’s eye, which then disappears again into the two-dimensionality of a sheet of paper.

Susanne Wiegner At the Museum, 2012, 3:00 At the Museum, 2012, 3:00 “at the museum” is a surprising game with the relationship between a work of art and the viewer’s imagination..

Susanne Wiegner my homeland – meine heimat, 2012, 1:33 my homeland – meine heimat, 2012, 1:33 [meine heimat] is a poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig, that describes a space of memories or a landscape, that is not clearly defined. “Heimat” is a very special German word, that can’t be translated into other languages, because it means as well a specific place, as a certain landscape or an abstract feeling. During the Third Reich in Germany, the word “Heimat” was barbarously and fanatically glorified and misused with the result that many people lost their “Heimat” and their lives. In the video a picture of a concentration camp is projected on the letters of the words [meine heimat] blended with a train ride through my own homeland that reminds also of the terrible deportations to show the ambiguity, that you feel as a German when you think about your “Heimat”.

Susanne Wiegner Inside My Room, 2013, 3:26 Inside My Room, 2013, 3:26 “inside this room all of my dreams become realities and some of my realities become dreams” (Willy Wonka and the Chocolat Factory). Von diesem Zitat ausgehend, erkundet die Kamera die Szenerie eines Arbeitstisches, die geheimnisvolle, kreative Welt eines Künstlers und gibt Hinweise auf verschiedene literarische, architektonische und künstlerische Einflüsse (Kafka, Jules Verne, Boullée, Caravaggio)

Susanne Wiegner the light – the shade, 2014, 7:07 the light – the shade, 2014, 7:07 “the light – the shade” is a poem by Robert Lax that plays with the contrasts and opposites light and shade, with bright and dark, black and white, red and blue. The film begins with a nighttime scenery in a city, moves into a room and starts watching the movement of the shadows on the wall. Finally the camera enters the screen of a laptop and goes deeper and deeper into the poem. The film becomes a journey through the realm of imagination, through spaces and pictures, through letters and words. In that way the minimal language of the poem is unfolded into unexpected pictures.

Susanne Wiegner Home, Sweet Home!, 2014, 2:59 Home, Sweet Home!, 2014, 2:59 The film shows the immediate, destrucive impact to a home by usual , everyday disturbances, that we create, watch and suffer at the same time.

Susanne Wiegner Future in the Past, 2015, 7:07 Future in the Past, 2015, 7:07 “Future in the Past” is a virtual time loop, that consists of only one continuous camera-drive without any cuts. The film is a journey through the realm of personal imagination and pictures, through surreal places and unexpected spaces. The style of the different interiors is a reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

Susanne Wiegner Contemplation is Watching, 2016, 6:08 Contemplation is Watching, 2016, 6:08 A yellow street lamp is the initial point for a journey through the realm of imagination. The film is based on a poem by Robert Lax and on his typical vertical typeface, that he used to force the reader to slowness and contemplation. The film gives also some hints to Lax’s biography. He lived and worked in New York City where he experienced a moment outside of time and space under a street lamp, that he described in his “21 pages”. He was travelling with a small circus before he moved to the Greek islands, where he lived for 35 years. In today’s world the films is also an invitation to take your eyes off the screen to have a look to your surroundings with all its mysteries and inspirations.

Susanne Wiegner noctilucent, 2017, 06:12 noctilucent, 2017, 06:12 Space fragments drift through the wide dark space like noctilucent clouds. They are fragmented memories of apparently past childhood days. Memories that are linearly arranged but which irritate because the spaces are incomplete and separated from each other, as if they could no longer be filled and built together by connecting memories or stories. The childhood places seem strangely cool and unused. The spaces and places give only a fleeting reference to dwellings and landscapes, as if the memories have lost their stories. The title also refers to the data clouds in which we store our memories, to which we entrust our data. Data that can be lost, partially deleted or manipulated. The film in the film motif also points to this. Is it still our own memory or just a film composed of fragments that we are looking at. “Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere. They are visible in a deep twilight. They are made of ice crystals. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. These clouds can be observed only during local summer months and when the Sun is below the horizon for the observer, but while the clouds are still in sunlight. They are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Susanne Wiegner Melting Fields, 2018, 8:16 Melting Fields, 2018, 8:16 A single camera movement explores a catastrophic scenario that cannot be classified neither spatially nor temporally. Is the flat overlooking the street just an illusion or the broken rooms in the inhospitable landscape. The title “melting fields” refers to the melting ice surfaces and glaciers as well as to an incipient loss of memory and of spatial and temporal orientation. The film conveys a sense of complete loneliness in a fragmented (mental) world.

Susanne Wiegner soliloquy, 2018, 5:55 soliloquy, 2018, 5:55 A still life at the museum reminds me of my grandmother’s fruit bowl and opens up to a world of imagination, memories and past or future disaster scenarios.

Susanne Wiegner Abysm, 2018, 6:20 Abysm, 2018, 6:20 The film is a visual game with changing perspectives and surprising points of view, that build an absurd scenario like a fantasy image without following physical laws. The different film scenes are repeatedly exposed as digital constructions and spatially resolved. The viewer is constantly deceived and can never be sure where he is until he realizes that he is trapped in a permanent loop of disaster..

Susanne Wiegner Sunrise, 2019, 5:46 Sunrise, 2019, 5:46 The film shows soul landscapes – inner images that convey in their vastness a sense of loneliness and threat. Certain scenes are a reminiscent of German romanticism, whose ambiguity is enhanced by cinematic means.

Susanne Wiegner Listen, 2019, 3:20 Listen, 2019, 3:20 The film is based on a haiku poem that painfully recalls a time that no longer seems to exist. The flowering meadow is just a memory image on the retina of a dead bee in the midst of a dystopian-looking environment. At the very end “the silence is broken”.

Susanne Wiegner Bellevue, 2020, 7:00 Bellevue, 2020, 7:00 The title Bellevue ironically refers to the by no means beautiful view, neither from the train window of a dystopian urban landscape, nor, figuratively, of a world that is heading for the abyss or has already crossed it. The hopelessness of the scenery is increased by the absurd protection and rescue platforms. The absent observer sitting at the supposedly safe window looks at a deconstructed, deserted world and is at the same time part of it

Susanne Wiegner Yesterdays Tomorrow Morning, 2021, 8:09 Yesterdays Tomorrow Morning, 2021, 8:09 A single tracking shot interweaves memory spaces, childhood images and visions of the future to create a more and more dystopian world. Every room, every shadow refers to new imaginary spaces that open up, which only at first glance portray an ideal childhood world. Nothing is what it seems, time does not run linearly, but becomes a round trip with no escape.

Susanne Wiegner Back drop, 2021, 4:03 Back drop, 2021, 4:03 The film shows that we live in the stage setting of an apparently ideal world. Despite the current crises and threats, we cling to this illusion of security and idyll, although we are slowly beginning to sense how fragile this life finally is. The very slow tracking shot demystifies our way of life.

Susanne Wiegner When Wishing, 2022, 8:15 When Wishing, 2022, 8:15 The title only seemingly refers to the fairy tales of childhood. A single camera movement traverses fragments of space and landscape, connecting childhood memories and visions of the future into a surreal spatial narrative that, however, does not end well. The individual spaces of memory are gradually penetrated and alienated by signs of current and future crises (climate change and energy crisis). They appear as deserted, archaeological fields that eventually disappear completely. The film constantly shifts perspectives. The view from the train compartment onto the highly technologized, abandoned dwellings symbolizes both the journey on which we find ourselves as a society and our comfortable position as detached observers. The telescope, which stands in a child’s room at the beginning, turns out to be the instrument through which the camera has looked into the future before the room sinks into the black floods.

Susanne Wiegner Looking Glass, 2023, 7:00 Looking Glass, 2023, 7:00 Looking Glass means mirror, but it was also the code name for an airborne command center of the US nuclear forces. The film also takes up the motif from “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll. Diving into another world through the mirror. However, in the film, the world in the mirror is not another world, but merely an extension of a deserted world. The familiar motifs of city, apartment, landscape are fragile fragments that only pretend to be a whole, they are parts of a theatrical illusion that in turn is part of a world under constant surveillance and at the mercy of foreign powers.

BORN: 1955, New York, USA

Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist and videographer whose practice includes the construction of large-scale outdoor sculptures and installations as well as the creation of ‘impossible’ moving and still images and architecture designed using 3D modelling, video editing, and image editing programs. Bunkley, a NZ/USA dual citizen, received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two NY state grants, and the Rome Prize Fellowship in the USA.

He has exhibited at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa, had international screenings including the White Box Gallery in NYC, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, at the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin several times between 2003-2024, and he exhibited video multiple times at File SaoPaolo. In 2012, he was an award winner at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for the «Now&After» Festival. He participated in the Athens Digital Arts Festival in 2017 and File Sao Paolo (2017, 2018, 2019). Bunkley screened his video, Ghost Shelter/6, at The Federation Square Big Screen, Channels Festival 2017, Melbourne, and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany, in 2018. He participated in the Visions in the Nunnery at the Nunnery/Bows art gallery in London in 2022.

In 2023, his video screenings include the Video Art Miden, the Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki, Greece; the Ibrida Festival of Experimental Audiovisual, Forlì, Italy; the Malatesta Short Film Festival, Cesena, Italy; the Odds & Ends Experimental Film Festival, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Rencontres Paris/Berlin.

Group exhibitions in 2023 include the Surrealist Vacation Resort Cologne – in collaboration with the Institute für Alles Mögliche Berlin and the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, LA; New Realism/Altered Reality at the Gallery23, NYC;the Hochkantfilmfest, FILE 2023, Sao Paolo, New Realism/Altered Reality, Gallery23 in NYC, RPM23, Boston and the Video Art Forum, Saudi Arabia.

In 2024, he exhibited sculpture and video at Cybersculpture 2024, Collège des Bernardins, Paris, France and screened video Experiments inCinema Festival v19.8, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Recent solo exhibitions include Ghost Shelter at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, NewZealand, in 2018; the Institut für Alles Mögliche/Stützpunkt Teufelsberg, Berlin, 2019; the Rabbit Room, Napier, NZ, 2022; Scott Lawrie Gallery, AucklandNew Zealand 2022, and aGallery, Whanganui, NZ 2023 and 2024.

Bunkley also makes experimental documentaries which he screened at Docfest Kassel 2019 and Jihlava IDFF 2021 and 2022 in the Czech Republic.

EDUCATION: Master of Fine Arts, Hunter College, New York, USA; Bachelor of Fine Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minnesota, USA AWARDS/DISTINCTIONS:
EVA (Experimental Video Architecture) – Special Mention, Best Idea Category (2013); The Wallace Art Awards – Finalist (2013);
Now&After ’12, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russian Federation – Third Prize (2012); Sculpture Whanganui Award – Winner (2011); Connell’s Bay
Sculpture Park Temporary Installation Project, Auckland (2008); Wallace Arts Trust Grant (2005);
Rome Prize Fellowship, American Academy, Rome, Italy(1985-86); New York State Council on the Arts Project Grant (1983-84); New York State Council on the Arts Artist’s Fellowship Grant, Creative Artist’s Program Service (1983); National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship (1980-81)

COLLECTIONS: Whanganui District Council (Hear My Train a’ Comin’ Commission); Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui; The James Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland; The New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington; Minnesota Percent for Art in Public Places, Minnesota History Center, USA; New York City College, USA; Bay Shore Train Station (N.Y.M.T.A., New York Arts for Transit Commission), USA

PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED): FILE 2015, Fiesp Cultural Center, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015); International short and longfilm videodays 2015, G.A.S-station gallery, Berlin, Germany (2015);
View Finder, Auckland Central Library (2014); 3D Printing and the Arts: What Things May Come, The Etter-Harbin Center, University of Texas, USA (2014);
CologneOFF X, Videoart Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece (2014); Digital Graffiti, Alys Beach, Florida, USA (2014); Odd Peer Nexus, The Young, Wellington (2014); The 10th Berlin International
Directors Lounge, Berlin, Germany (2014); Festival Images Contre Nature 2013, Théâtre des Chartreux, Marseille, France (2013); Paradox of Plenty, Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre,
Auckland (2013); Oslo Screen Festival, Oslo Central Station, Norway (2013); Rosebank Artwalk/Sitework, Auckland Arts Festival (2013); White Night, Auckland Arts Festival (2013); Now&After ’12, Moscow
Museum of Modern Art, Russian Federation (2012); CologneOFF 8, Budapest International Shortfilm Festival, Hungry, ExTeresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); O:4W Film Festival, Cardiff, Wales
(2012); Dio-noia (Dioramas of Paranoia), The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson (2011); E4C, Electronic Gallery, Seattle, USA (2011); Sanctioned Array-Other2 Specify, WHITE BOX, New York, USA
(2010); Hybrids, Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Centre, Auckland (2010); Rencontres Internationales Madrid/Berlin/Paris, Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, Spain,The Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
Berlin, Germany, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Urban Screens Melbourne 08, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia (2008); Slow Train a’ Comin’, The New Zealand
Film Archive Pelorus Trust Mediagallery, Wellington (2007); 404 Festival: 4th Edition, Trieste, Rome, Vienna, Hasselt, Europe (2007); Rural Vignettes, The New Zealand Film Archive Gallery, Wellington
(2006)

PUBLICATIONS/ARTICLES: ‘Thinking well outside the box’ by Mark Amery, The Dominion Post, Feb 2014; ‘Return of the spider man’ by Linda Herrick, The New Zealand Herald, Sept 2013; ‘Train of
Thought’, Art News New Zealand, Winter 2012, pg 24; Artsville, TVNZ, 2011 (Documentary); Marshall, John (ed.), Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders, Lancaster, UK: Fast-uk, 2008, pp 40-41; Fleming,
Ronald Lee, The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design, London, UK: Merrell Publishing, 2008, pp 84 -85; Bloodworth, Sandra and William Ayres, Along the
Way: MTA Arts for Transit, Celebrating 20 Years of Public Art, New York, USA: Monacelli Press, 2006

Brit Bunkley
videomaker from New Zealand

Interview: 10 questions

1. Tell me something about your life and the educational background
I attended Macalister College in St Paul Minnesota (73-75), and then Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) (75-78. BFA). At that time, we had amazing professors including Siah Armajani, Ken Feingold and Bill Bollinger and also a lively visiting artist’s series that included Germano Celant, Vito Acconci and Robert Irwin.

I moved to NYC in 1979 where I attended the MFA program at Hunter College. I graduated in 1984. During this period I was very lucky to have received a Rome Prize Fellowship (“Prix de Rome”), a New York State Council on the Arts (N.Y.S.C.A.), Project grant, a C.A.P.S. (Creative Artist’s Program Service), N.Y. State artist’s fellowship grant, and a USA National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship. I was a frequent finalist for public art commissions throughout the late 80’s and early 90’s (before moving for a teaching position in New Zealand). I have received over a dozen permanent and temporary commissions in the USA and New Zealand.

2. When, how and why started your filming?
In the late nineties I first used video as a virtual tool with 3D Studio digital software to visualize public art commission with animated flyover. I soon began experimenting with other animation capabilities of the software. In the early 2000’s I added actual footage to the digital animations and have since focused more on straight video with fewer effects and animations.

3. What kinds of topics have your films?
I am intrigued by the intersection of virtual and physical sculpture and the juncture of animation and captured video. The content of the art work often focuses on an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony. Although my media of choice has evolved to a certain degree, I am pursuing interests that are fairly consistent with my last 30+ years of practice: eccentric architecture, Kafkaesque dreamscapes, the social and political apocalyptic dimensions of art, indexes of conflict, and whimsical human revelry.

4. How do you develop your films, do you follow certain principles, styles etc?
My films are intuitive, basically improvised from an overall idea. So for instance, I travelled to the American Southwest looking for evidence of the Manhattan Project (which developed the first atomic bomb) in the Los Alamos region. I ended up with the video -By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand- (https://vimeo.com/80689200) which included dream-like clips from the Southwest coast of NZ’s North Island in addition to the US Southwest – home to both the atomic bomb and regions of extreme human caused environmental degradation.

5. Tell me something about the technical equipment you use.
I currently use a powerful desk top computer and laptop with 3D Studio Max and Adobe software and HD video cameras.

6. These days digital technology is dominating also video as a medium. In which way the digital aspect is entering the creation of your videos, technologically and/or conceptually?
I am actually using less digital effects than I used to do – less 3D animation and green screen compositing. That said, I discovered photogrammetry software in the last that is capable of scanning in not only small object but also large building s and even landscapes. I have used this form of scanning in an attempt to create dream-like “fly-overs” utilizing intentional partial and noisy (bumpy) 3D models (see the mid-section of Kafka’s Sisters https://vimeo.com/109547855).

7. How do you finance your films?
Self-financed, and through teaching and research grants.

8. Do you work individually as a video artist/film maker or do you work in a team?
I work individually as a video artist. I have never worked with moving film.

9. Who or what has a lasting influence on your film/video making?
Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Mathew Barney, Sam Taylor-Wood, David Lynch, Laurie Anderson, Bill Viola, Gary Hill etc.

10. What are your future plans or dreams as a film/video maker?
Nothing specific. They are almost always improvised.

Can works of yours viewed online besides on the CologneOFF platform? Where?
List some links & resources

https://www.britbunkley.com

Brit Bunkley
by Sarah McClintock

Brit Bunkley’s work exists in an uncomfortable place where fiction and fact converge. Working within the tradition of Franz Kafka and David Lynch, Bunkley’s video and three-dimensional works distort our understanding of reality and make the familiar strange. His work could easily fall under the banner of Surrealism; it is certainly bizarre, uncanny and disconcerting. He manipulates realities to create a space somewhere between the familiar and alien. However, what distinguishes this work from the surreal is its ability to move beyond and through perceived realities into a kind of meta-reality. Bunkley creates a reality that is more than, greater than and yet still an enigma.

Inspired by Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, several of Bunkley’s works depict colossal insects dominating landscapes. These spiders and cockroaches are the inheritors of an earth well on the way to a destruction caused by climate change. For Bunkley, apocalyptic anxiety can be traced back to his childhood in the USA. Cold War kids were taught that the Red Scare was looming and a nuclear
winter at the hands of the Soviets was imminent. Trained from a young age to hunker under their school desks and in bomb shelters, it was a fact of life that the two great powers, America and Russia, had thousands of weapons pointed at each other and that the end of the world could come at any moment. Despite this tension the insects in Bunkley’s work are not pseudo Godzillas wreaking
destruction. They could easily be presented for shock value alone but he treats his subjects with sympathy and humour. He has an obvious fondness and respect for these creatures who will populate the planet long after we have departed.
The existential dread that inhabits much of Bunkley’s work comes from a deep interest in politics, history and the environment. He has equal interest in capitalism and socialism, nature and technology, beauty and desolation. This is never clearer that when considering his sculptural work. Made with 3D printers, these disabled objects reference the corrupting forces of communism and
capitalism in society and art. In 2014 Bunkley spent time in Central and Eastern Europe and observed the statues of Lenin and Stalin that still reside in many of the former Soviet cities in this region. These sculptures use the tradition of classical Greek and Roman art to position these deeply flawed tyrannical leaders as heroes.
Bunkley usurps this message to reveal the ways in which history and art are open for corruption. Capitalism is not exempt from Bunkley’s critical eye. The armed forces and banking institutions are built on sand, slipping into each other with the helping hand of the United States government.
In his recent video work, Kafka’s Sisters (2015), made primarily with footage shot in Berlin and Prague, architectural features become alien invaders through isolation and mirroring. Presented against black or generic skies these bizarre objects are accompanied by a booming and ominous soundscape, reminiscent of the threatening scores used in science fiction and horror films. Bunkley gives these usually benign sights an unsettling sense of doom, and a keen sense of remoteness is key to the impact of this work. Reminiscent of the Paddy Chayefsky novel and the 1980 film Altered States, where a scientist explores the effects of sensory deprivation, Bunkley shows us that reality is questionable, constructed and often terrifying.

Brit Bunkley:
How They Dream / The Gilded Age

Born in New York City, Brit Bunkley immigrated to New Zealand in 1995 to take up a teaching position as head of sculpture at the Quay School of the Arts, Whanganui. He has multiple accolades to his name – a US National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1980, the 1985/86 Rome Prize fellowship, winner of the Connells Bay Temporary Installation Project in 2008/09, winner of Sculpture Whanganui in 2011, third prize at Now&After 2012 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and second prize in the Sustainability Short Film Competition in Gainsborough, North Carolina in 2019.
In 1979, reacting to the metamorphosis of modernist specificity into postmodern anything goes, the art historian Rosalind Krauss published her essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”. This text laid out in a diagram what Krauss saw as the structural relationships of sculpture, architecture, and landscape art. Brit would have been her worst nightmare. His work stops at all stations, often all at the same time.
Brit started out as a more or less traditional sculptor and made large public art projects in the United States commemorating regional and historical events. Eventually, though, he grew disenchanted with the tropes of public art and distrustful of the political motives behind it. This was well in advance of the movement today to tear down any signifier of the problematic past.
Brit’s work is contradictory, wry and meditative, riffing on history and social commentary. He is the master of the postmodern folly, a maker of emblemata – a learned but fantastical recreation of symbols by humanists steeped in the aesthetic past.
Since his move to Aotearoa, his monuments are mostly built in cyberspace for subversive purposes where the possibilities are open and endless. Attempting to put his work into a categorical box is nigh on impossible, and probably a disrespectful exercise in futility anyway – it simply refuses that sort of crude treatment. It encompasses sculpture, installation, public art, architecture, digital video, virtual environments and 3D printed sculpture.
Brit continues to explore the dynamics and intentions of public space, but now it is with a more cynical eye, sensitive to its ironies. There may be references to Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, Albert Speer’s Germania, or Disneyland.
Increasingly Heideggerian distinction between art and brute technology has decayed, beauty is no longer truth, and the boundaries of public and private no longer certain. That is the territory Brit works in, making the inscape an outer scape.
In a moment the viewer can be reduced to the position of Kafka’s cockroach (or giant computer-rendered Avondale Spider as in Brit’s 2015 The Huntsman) scuttling through the cultural detritus and ruins of the modern world. The 3D renderings are as hollow as consumer endgame capitalism. There is always a hint of memento mori, of vanitas – the skull beneath the skin, and the apocalypse behind the sublime.

References to the neoclassical in Brit’s work invoke the spectre of the architecture of totalitarianism and violence. In the video work The Waxing of Joy (2014) he put footage of Cuban salsa dancing to a slow cello as a commentary on what he saw as the internal ironies and stultifying nature of Anglo-Pākehā culture.
The public monument Primitive Accumulation (2008) consisted largely of an enormous cube of tightly stacked garden gnomes. The title was a reference to Marx’s Das Kapital and the popularity of garden gnomes among the East German proletariat despite them being banned by GDR. Other works concern themselves with landscape and environmental degradation.
Underlying it all is a kind of architectural metaphor for the way the clever fake, the ersatz, the Baudrillardian simulacrum, is shoving the human out of public space. That’s not new – Walter Benjamin warned us in the 1930s of arcades as places for distracting the masses from the space being stolen out from under them. That was before the ultimate fakers and kitschmeisters, the Nazis, got him.
Now shopping malls are the stage were Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” is enacted, insulated by a Potemkin village crust. Brit’s art is too uncanny, too Unheimlich to be hidden behind such distractions.
The artist’s carefully conceived, playful ambiguity, is a kind of uncanny valley that keeps us guessing about what is CGI and what is physical model. He cocks a snook at the abounding ironies in the idea that an ahistorical fake carries with it the same emotional authenticity as the original. Hence the Prince of Wales’ Poundbury and Disney’s Stepford-esque town of Celebration are kitsch.
Brit’s work thrives on the rich manure of gothic Pākehā anxieties about identity and influence. Coming from outside the neurotic fishbowl he sees it all too clearly: a colonial society barely coming to terms wit past, held hostage by a brooding, sublime landscape that has always been more interesting than any settler culture emergent here, resentful of the authenticity of the indigenous.
Things are, perhaps, a little more comfortable and complacent these days, so Brit, through the medium of art, turns it up to a hundred so we can remember and process it. There is very likely a kind of therapeutic value in this, although there’s a lot of trauma and baggage to get past first before reaching the breakthrough.
It is never all horror and condemnation in Brit’s work, though. There is always room for beauty and wit. Popular culture is celebrated even as it is autopsied.
We might be amusing ourselves to death as a civilisation, but Brit’s corrective medicine is even more fun.

Andrew Paul Wood
02.07.22

Brit Bunkley, For Sanderson Contemporary Art
By Mark Amery. 2013

After decades of scientific and technological development hurtling us ever faster forward, we know that science fiction can be close to science fact.
Science fiction scenarios are often played out by way of horror stories that become engrained in the popular consciousness. Childhood nightmares from reading The Day of the Triffids or 1984, for example, remain with us as adults in the shadows, warning of the dangers that come with genetic modification or surveillance by unseen forces.
Playing with these shadows, Brit Bunkley’s art explores the tension between nature and culture – something increasingly mediated through computers.
Working digitally, Bunkley plays unsettlingly with the unsettled quicksand material that is nature manipulated, altered and industrialised. He gives nature a shunting, mechanistic sheen: things aren’t quite right; there is a ghost in the machine. Like the giant computer-rendered Avondale Spider rampaging through an industrial zone, as if in a B Horror movie in video installation The
Huntsman, there is also the sense that nature just might bite back.
In Bunkley’s work you sense an apocalyptic raincloud hanging over the New Zealand landscape. As apparition it is like a modern memento mori – the grim reaper in the shape of a fighter plane. And yet Bunkley doesn’t just evoke horror or protest environmental degradation. There is beauty and wit. He celebrates our landscapes and popular culture as much as he tunnels down under their heavily marketed, glossy surfaces. The gnomes and angels that sometimes appear in his work, remind us of the preciousness of nature and humanity, and the delicate fabric that holds the human, natural and spiritual worlds in balance. Like the shimmying shadows of dancers in Bunkley’s Upbeat on 1, Downbeat on 2 there is beauty in the push and pull of nature and culture’s dance.
Whether video, public object or a drawing of a 3D wireframe model Bunkley’s work is all in essence sculpture: how material and the shapes it might take express our relationship to the world. Natural or synthetic, he is concerned with the construction of things. How a material’s potential might be extended (brick or blood), and how everything is ultimately made from a series of building blocks or pixels.
Bunkley’s background has bearing on the distinctiveness of his practice. He shifted from the United States to Whanganui in the late 1990s (CHECK DATE) to teach, bringing with him a rich public sculpture practise just as the digital revolution was upon us. Now surrounded by green, undulating chemically altered farmland, Bunkley had shifted contexts dramatically, but this step away provides him a keen eye on militaristic attitudes towards our environment.
The way we engage with our environment here in New Zealand, Bunkley’s work seems to suggest, might not be so different to the way his former homeland engages as a power within the world. On the other hand, in his study of insects and landscapes Bunkley is also celebrating the combative resistence nature itself asserts. With this much drama embedded in our landscape, who needs horror movies?

18 January – 1 March 2025

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Click the images to open the videos

Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Fleeced, 2009, 4:22
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Futurology, 2011, 6:06
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand, 2014, 5:37
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Kafka’s Sisters, 2014, 3:57
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Pillar of Cloud, 2016, 4:0B
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Godzone, 2017, 5:32
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Ghost Shelter 6, 2018, 5:48
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Ghost Zone, 2018, 6:24
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Bushdance, 2020, 4:47
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Hambach, 2020, 4:33
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Pillar of Fire, 2021, 5:59
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Dear_hart,_how_they_dream._how_we_dream, 2022, 3:41
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Blood River, 2021 – 6:51
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Deep Nostalgia – The Anarchists, 2022, 4:01
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – The Peaceable Kingdom, 2023, 5:28
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Natural Intelligence, 2024 – 7:11
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Conditions of the Heart, 2024, 6:48

Brit Bunkley Fleeced, 2009, 4:22 Fleeced, 2009, 4:22 “Fleeced” is a series of interrelated video vignettes that obliquely refer to psychological, environmental, and social-political dislocations set within rural settings of the Southern North Island of New Zealand. It features environmental collapse mixed with cultural discombobulation (as I have experienced disjointed similarities with the NZ sheep paddock I live next to, the river it overlooks and my childhood home in semi-rural New England).

Brit Bunkley Futurology, 2011, 6:06 Futurology, 2011, 6:06 Paradox of Plenty (Futurology) begins with vignettes of futuristic edifices of the Auckland Sky Tower, various airport terminals, a natural gas cargo ship, and the Seattle Space Needle. Each of these structures is mirrored along a single axis, a minor adjustment that has a major affect: the ordinary, practical edifices become features of a fantastic, Flash Gordonesque City of the Future – or the assets of a post-apocalyptic military force. The work’s futuristic “ships” have a double nature that goes beyond their mirrored symmetry. They are practical and functional, like the industrial constructions they are, but also dream-like. They are aspirational, but also threatening, with a military or bomb-like aspect. However much they are altered by their mirroring, though, these remain recognisable as structures that exist now, in today’s world; structures that are vaguely dystopian: mundane, transitory, bad for the environment, or just outmoded. A tank crosses over the Verdun. A battle in a pine forest segues into a 3D cartoon representation of the Simpsons -while dissolving into an apocalyptic 3D version of The Simpsons’ nuclear factory. The landscape is devoid of characters mapped with a satellite image of the USA Midwest in winter as ashes fall.

Brit Bunkley By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand, 2014, 5:37 By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand, 2014, 5:37 “By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand” is a video montage of two contrasting landscapes: the lush coastal hill country of the southwest of the North Island of New Zealand and the American Southwest – with a brief interlude of satellite images of the southwest of the North Island of New Zealand and forest fires in the Los Alamos – Colorado Springs regions, where the video was shot. Environmental degradation and post-nuclear Armageddon are suggested by the enlarged mutated insects and the mythic trope of bubbling blood. Los Alamos is the home of the Manhattan Project, Ancestral Pueblo ruins and a VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope – producing images from the edge of the known universe, hundreds of times more detailed than those from the Hubble Space). Colorado Springs is the home of the Garden of the Gods and NORAD (the command centre of the cold war). Both have witnessed extensive forest fires in recent years – some of the worst in US history. Climate change has significantly extended the wildfire season. .

Brit Bunkley Kafka’s Sisters, 2014, 3:57 Kafka’s Sisters, 2014, 3:57 The Kafkaesque…. An attempt to find common ground between Franz Kafka’s waking nightmares, state terrorism and neoclassicism. This video begins with mist moving rapidly over Eastern European hills, segueing towards Berlin and Prague’s neoclassical/gothic spires (reinvented as benignly sinister space ships). It then proceeds to three flyover animated 3D scans of three ruins – all important edifices from the Third Reich: 1. The abandoned US NSA towers on top of Teufelsberg, an artificial hill of the WW2 rubble of Berlin heaped on top of a Nazi technical college 2. An Albert Speer structure built to study the feasibility of constructing a massive triumphal arch on the site. 3. The Auschwitz II-Birkenau gate. Had Kafka survived TB and remained in Prague or Berlin until the 1940’s, he would have likely been murdered by the Nazis, as were his 3 sisters. They were sent with their families to the Łódź ghetto. Two died in the ghetto, and the third later died at Auschwitz.

Brit Bunkley Pillar of Cloud, 2016, 4:0B Pillar of Cloud, 2016, 4:0B Oil, ghost towns and dust devils are aligned as tropes of climate change. Tornado-like dust devils, as canaries in the coal mine, are increasingly common in hot, barren deserts and in drought-stricken areas of the world. I spent three days chasing dust devils in the California desert where I tried a benignly quixotic experiment of placing flower petals in their paths. (Catastrophic climate change needed some cheering up.) However, after an initial sighting of dozens of dust devils, conditions changed and they became increasingly rare. When they appeared, they moved fast. They dissipated quickly. They were always too far off the road or just ahead of my car. When I was ready to give up looking after my third day while shooting video of an abandoned school, a well-formed small dust devil appeared about 10 meters to my right. I turned my camera on a tripod towards it, snatched a bag of flower petals that I had bought at LA’s flower district and ran into the small vortex dumping the contents. …It grabbed the petals and then dropped them 30 meters or so away.

Brit Bunkley Godzone, 2017, 5:32 Godzone, 2017, 5:32 “Godzone” is a colloquial term for New Zealand – shorthand for “God’s Own Country”. It was first used in NZ as the title of a poem about New Zealand written by Thomas Bracken in 1890. In this video, industrial architecture (quaint, but ominous in their decay) vie with striking NZ landscape rendered in virtual 3D. Actual footage is combined with the 3D alternate reality of flyovers of Solaris-like islands such as a factory ruin that segues into a clip of a NZ park built during the work programs of the Great Depression – a unique landscape rich in both Ponga fern trees and redwoods, part Jurassic Park and part northern California.

Brit Bunkley Ghost Shelter 6, 2018, 5:48 Ghost Shelter 6, 2018, 5:48 An apocalyptical future here and now. Ghost Shelter (Six Sites) encompasses a variety of significant post-industrial structures all at the edge of metropolitan regions in various states of ruin (actual or digital). They are created from 3D scans and drone footage, rendered and animated in 3D as discrete virtual entities – like the islands of memory of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. 1. Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf, an abandoned chemical factory in the former German Democratic Republic 2. The Teufelsberg, a NSA listening station in Berlin built on top of a man-made hill constructed from the rubble of WW2 Berlin. 3. Immerath, a ghost town in western Germany removed in 2017 by the energy giant RWE for the expansion of their open cast coal mine, Garzweiler. 4. The Martha Project, a NZ open cast gold mine whose mining operations ground to a halt due a major landslide collapsing the north wall of the mine. 5. Domes of Case Grande, an incomplete and abandoned futuristic computer facility in Arizona. 6. The Sleeping Beauty Castle, the centrepiece of the California Disneyland Park, modelled on the late 19th century Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany.

Brit Bunkley Ghost Zone, 2018, 6:24 Ghost Zone, 2018, 6:24 Ghost Zone is an homage to Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979) that takes us on a journey to the original expedition into the ineffable aqueous “Zone” – where wishes may be granted, “the desire that has made you suffer most”. This video crosses geographical and metaphysical boundaries. For example, the dream sequence is enacted on both a stream in Whanganui NZ, and the original site of the filming of the Stalker in Estonia on the Jägala River. Bunkley stitches together his footage in such a way that the landscape and buildings resemble a magic realist post-apocalyptic wasteland. Photographic composites of the two rural locations have been made a lot easier with the use of drone-captured imagery in that they will accommodate points of view not accessible from the ground. From this data, he uses photogrammetry 3D scanning to create his eerie works as Tarkovsky’s “islands of memory” (Solaris).

Brit Bunkley Bushdance, 2020, 4:47 Bushdance, 2020, 4:47 This video represents a contemplation of escape to another time, another universe during a period of crisis. Bush Dance is a video of interactions within previously unexplored bush during the Covid 19 lock down – a close up of an ancient Titoki tree while reading Micho Kaku and Clifford Pickover essays on hyperspace and dancing salsa to ambient music in a Tyvek suit. Readings from: “Borrowed Time: Interview with Michio Kaku” on the physics of time travel in Scientific American November 2003, and “Surfing Through Hyperspace” by Clifford A. Pickover. P. 71 (quoting Jane Roberts and Ann Rice).

Brit Bunkley Hambach, 2020, 4:33 Hambach, 2020, 4:33 Synopsis: The edge of the RWE open pit mine engulfed what was once a town of 900 inhabitants in 2019. Nearby, the expanding Hambach lignite mine was encroaching upon the remaining ancient Hambach forest that once covered the mine. Thousands of demonstrators, dressed in white Tyvek suits, have protested in recent years to save the remaining 200 hectares of the Hambach Forest. (The Tyvek suit sequences were videoed pre-Covid) In November 2019 I returned to the town of Immerath on the edge of the immense Garzweiler open pit mine. I had scanned (in 3D) this town that was slated for removal when I last visited it in 2016. Three houses now remained on the site. The edge of the RWE open pit mine drew closer to what was once a town of 900 inhabitants. Down the road, the expanding Hambach lignite mine was consuming the ancient Hambach forest that once covered the mine. Thousands of demonstrators have protested in recent years to save the remaining 200 hectares of the Hambach Forest. I climbed the Hambach hill to fly my drone towards the mine. Geofencing stopped the drone mid-air. I could only see a distant pit encased in fog. On the other side of the hill, wind generators arose from the fog as if floating in the clouds.

Brit Bunkley Pillar of Fire, 2021, 5:59 Pillar of Fire, 2021, 5:59 “Pillar of Fire” uses its biblical reference as a secular metaphor for catastrophic climate change. The video is a montage of landscapes ranging from an abandoned mesa top pueblo to the cold war era “iron cross” Corona Satellite Calibration Target ruins in Arizona. Deer, including the extinct Père David’s deer, walk, jump and run through these landscapes while leaping into a black void. Finally, the New Zealand “Bridge to Nowhere” animation clip, floating in this empty void, segues into an archetypal New Zealand Forest landscape.

Brit Bunkley Dear_hart,_how_they_dream._how_we_dream, 2022, 3:41 Dear_hart,how_they_dream.how_we_dream, 2022, 3:41 Winner of the NYC Indie Festival 2024 (Art/Experimental) – “Dear Hart, How they dream. How we dream.” consists of animations of a hybrid Père David’s deer combined with video footage where deer inhabit human space. Absent of humans, the video would depict deer interacting naturally within human settings. Convincingly real but at the same time clearly digital, they encompass a type of animal deepfake ontology. The Père David’s deer is an unusual animal whose antlers grow like tree branches – a chimerical animal. “The species is sometimes known by its informal name, sì bú xiàng… literally meaning four not alike… or like none of the four…The hooves of a cow but not a cow. The neck of a camel but not a camel. Antlers of a deer but not a deer. The tail of a donkey, but not a donkey.”

Brit Bunkley Blood River, 2021 - 6:51 Blood River, 2021 – 6:51 The Rio Tinto river in Huelva Province runs red like blood due to iron oxides from an ancient 5000-year-old mine upstream. It is still mined today. Nearby the village of El Membrillos Bajo was razed to the ground by Franco’s forces in 1937.

Brit Bunkley Deep Nostalgia - The Anarchists, 2022, 4:01 Deep Nostalgia – The Anarchists, 2022, 4:01 The stereotype of an anarchist has been a bearded bomb-throwing terrorist or a young masked delinquent. Anarchy has become synonymous with chaos and a selfish lack of wisdom. Anarchy is, in fact, the opposite. Anarchy strives towards a stateless order and mutual aid. Anarchism emphasises compassion, kindness, reason and equality. Adherents to anarchy ranged from Mahatma Gandhi to Bertrand Russell, from Helen Keller to Franz Kafka. For the most part, the activism of the libertarian left anarchist gave way to democratic socialism in recent years, while striving for a left-libertarian ideal, ironically within the state*. After decades of preparation, anarchists and their union, the CNT/FAI, took over much of Spain in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil war. Within a year, those regions still under their influence were undermined by the Stalinists. As the Republic fell, many who remained were imprisoned or executed during Franco’s white terror.

Brit Bunkley The Peaceable Kingdom, 2023, 5:28 The Peaceable Kingdom, 2023, 5:28 “The Peaceable Kingdom” is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks. He painted 62 versions of the Peaceable Kingdom of peaceful coexistence between predators and prey (“an eschatological state inferred from texts such as the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Hosea, and the Sermon on the Mount”). Absent of humans, the video would depict animals interacting naturally within human settings. Convincingly real but at the same time clearly digital, they encompass a type of animal deepfake ontology. (The use of actual animals would be prohibitively expensive. And they would probably eat each other before the first take.) These animals are in a sense, totems – spiritual kin. I have taken cues from David Lynch’s hauntingly surreal interiors and animal shorts (“Rabbits”, “What Did Jack Do?”) which appear to poke holes into a parallel universe while inhabiting oblique dreams. Ildikó Enyedi’s magical film “On Body and Soul” is another touchstone. It is revealed in this film that the two work colleagues of an abattoir unfamiliar with each other, a manager and a new inspector unknowingly share a recurring dream of two deer, male and female in the forest. They, of course, fall in love.

Brit Bunkley Natural Intelligence, 2024 - 7:11 Natural Intelligence, 2024 – 7:11 his video is a scrapbook of dreams of (or by) animals inhabiting a world without humans. Natural Intelligence is “intelligence created by nature, natural evolutionary mechanisms,” – as opposed to artificial intelligence. With it, “there is a dynamic movement of natural intelligence that evolves from vague, fuzzy, and unconscious states to more concrete and conscious states, and thus realizing the essence of perception” (Perlovsky and Kozma, 2007, p. 1). It is beautiful and deeply flawed, but it levels out in the end.

Brit Bunkley Conditions of the Heart, 2024, 6:48 Conditions of the Heart, 2024, 6:48 This video embodies the functions of life forms, from eating and digesting with an emphasis on the heart – as signs of empathy, sympathy, and conditions of mutual aid.