INTERLINKING Collective: INTERLINKING Year: 2020 (8.30)
While Coronavirus disease still holds the world its breath physical collaboration between dancers and artists seemed to be on hold. Inspired through the lockdown situation in so many countries international dancers got connected online. The dancers were asked to interpret the morse code of their cities. Morse code is the oldest possibility to communicate across long distances and is the artistic idea of connecting cities online via sound.
Julia Keenan: Tender Vessels (2.54)
I have always been interested in people, in how they communicate and choose to represent themselves. My work is currently thinking around the impact of digital media – specifically social media on these things. Materials are central to the practice and have evolved carefully through research and experimentation and have come to represent my visual language.
There is a constant tension between the sculptures I make and their rather more glamorous imaged based portraits which have all been through the filtering process of social media. The lines between where the actual work begins, and ends is always eluding me.
Tender Vessels is a series of images presented as a visualisation of a thought process. They utilise a closed set of materials and motifs that are embedded within my practice, the substance of which is my visual language.
These new works are manipulated photographs of physical sculptures created in the studio which have been subjected to the filters and editing process of the social media experience.
The images have an ethereal transient quality [almost like an x-ray] and it is interesting to view these through a social anthropological context. Although the work is made up of individual ‘closed’ images there is an affinity or dialogue between them. The materials echo the intention of the work and the compositions suggest physical structures or anatomy
The work is questioning the role of social media in society, how do individuals interact within these closed isolated spaces? The title is referencing the idea of individuals as the ‘vessels’ and the hopeful wish for tenderness.
This film ‘Tender Vessels’ is a progression of an existing body of work into a digitised format. The work is informed by the on-line experience, specifically social media, and the affect this has had on human communication and representation.
My interest lies in the spaces between analogue and digital process, where there is overlap or glitching and the causal effect to the resultant work.
The process was inspired by the experimental film maker Chris Marker [1921-2012] specifically his film ‘La Jetee’ [1962].
https://www.floorrmagazine.com/directory
Sean Smuda: The Pain (4.08)
The Berlin Coronnale is a daily map of the psycho-spatial effects of the COVID isolation, where one can go in public, and what possible directions this new world holds. For the first 40 days of lockdown a daily performance video was made that included improvised songs, movement, and images of the city in lockdown. As things have opened back up these are more layered and roughly weekly. Currently footage sent by friends from Minneapolis (my hometown), is included, an alchemy of brutal and hopeful implications.
Sean Smuda is an artist, photographer, and writer, living and working in Berlin. He employs a variety of mediums including photography, video, and performance rooted in Contact Improvisation. His projects and collaborations have taken place in Antarctica, China, Iraq, Tibet, and Wall Street. His work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Centre.
Javier Velazquez: The communion of tics, gestures, and manners ACTS 1 & 3 (9.18)
Javier Velázquez Cabrero (Madrid, 1990), visual artist and dancer with a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, studying part of his degree in Germany, at the ABK in Stuttgart with Professor Christian Jankowski. He currently resides in Mexico City where he finished his studies in Soma.
The film is divided into 3 acts and described a bodily relationship that continually evolves from confrontation to collaboration. It is choreographed in collaboration with D. Thanatelo (South Africa). It is an afro-fusion with components of traditional dances from southern Africa (Indlamu –Zulu- or Setapa– Tswana-), and Spain with elements of flamenco and street dance
Javier contributes with a deconstruction of a gestural repertoire of icons of Spanish popular music and relates these gestures with body dynamics used in street dance. Thatanelo, developed as an educator, choreographer and dance activist in the South African environment marked by Apartheid. He brings a series of logics of movements and body narratives common in southern Africa.
From these gestures, a body conversation is carried out in different settings. In a continuous construction of approach/distance, both between the bodies of the dancers and in the similarities between the gestures of the identity cultures of both.
http://www.javier-velazquez.com/
Mitja Zupnac: Palinka (9.30)
Mitja Zupanc is a masters student studying photography. The following submission is called Palinka. Written and directed by Mitja Zupanc and created by Elaine Artemieff. It is a conversation between two individuals.
Instagram: @mitja_zupanc
Jack Thomson: We Are Ready (2.05)
Born in York, Jack Thomson is an artist, with practises performance, photography, and film. After graduating from The Rambert School he was a recipient of a Weston Jerwood Creative Bursary to develop further as an artist (2015/2016).
As a performer Jack has dance work by choreographers Mark Baldwin, Shobana Jeyasingh, Izik Galli, Caroline Finn, Alexander Whitley, Ohad Narhin and Willi Dorner to name a few.
In 2017 Jack was commissioned by Random Acts to direct and choreograph, Business is Brutal, which has gone on to be screened in over 40 film festivals across the Globe. Most recently Jack created ‘We Are Ready Now’, a short moving image piece commissioned by Arts Council England and BBC arts.
“Most of the work I make is largely about the relationship between the moving body, the camera and the context these two come together in.”
In we are ready, bodies navigate and self-organise as they run alone but dance together. The competitive landscape is overwhelmed by public and personal spaces. Actions act as the only markers in time, as they are reduced to noticeable and forgettable images.
Where are we in this moment? Individuals unknowingly connected through unseen templates of social dynamic, captured in the container of the now.
www.jack-thomson.com