HD video, color, sound (shot Super8 film), 10:08 min,
Riga / Berlin, 2010 / 2016
a film by: Laura Horelli, Brigitta Kuster, Nina Lassila, Agnese Luse, Angela Melitopoulos, Eléonore de Montesquiou,
Tanja Ostojić, Meggie Schneider, Isabell Spengler, Gitte Villesen
In 2010, the Latvian curator Agnese Luse invited nine Berlin-based female artists to Riga for a week, in order to present their films at the Survival-Kit 2 Festival. After five days of discourse and lively discussions about the precarious realities of women and female artists in the workplace, they decided to spend the last Sunday of their visit at the beach in Jūrmala. The trip began with a Super8 Camera, and during their travels, they wrote their first manifesto: each artist shall have a minute of Super8 film at their disposal and devise a scene to film, while the others participate.
The resulting film owes its dramatic composition to the idea of the refrain: each of the artists, as well as the curator individually conceived and personally created a soundtrack to a one-minute film fragment. The cohesiveness of the film is rooted in the soundtrack montage, which relates to and reinterprets the picture track as it repeats itself. The visual narrative of a given clip thus presents unforeseen events and unfolding surprises.
Just such an occurrence uncannily captures the situation of creation and its conditions. While the women are performing on the beach, wandering in and out of portable toilets installed at the beach and slamming the doors of the cabins – presumably reflecting the discussions of their week together in Riga – a woman passing by on the beach joins their choreography, entering the frame shortly before the clip ends. She poses an existential question: she asks if the toilets are free to use, and then enters a cabin. Staging, chance, and reality go hand-in-hand.
by and with:
Laura Horelli
Brigitta Kuster
Nina Lassila
Agnese Luse
Angela Melitopoulos
Eléonore de Montesquiou
Tanja Ostojić
Meggie Schneider
Isabell Spengler
Gitte Villesen