Velocipeden Union
A form study of a bike with Neue Sachlichkeit connotation, produced within the artist network Filmligan, active in the south of Sweden in the early 1960s.… >>>
- Duration: 9 Min.
- Director: Kjell Johansson
Dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of Swedish experimental film and video art. Filmform (est. 1950) is the oldest existing organization of its kind in Sweden and is often engaged as an advisor to museums, galleries, universities, and festivals. Constantly expanding, the collection spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers within the field of moving images. Works from Filmform are available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes. For more information, access the full distribution catalogue at www.filmform.com. Filmform is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Arts Grants Committee and the Swedish Arts Council.
This program reflects the broad range of artistic expressions and methods presented among new works in Filmform’s distribution catalog. It opens with the recently discovered and newly restored film Velocipeden Union – this form study was produced within the artist network Filmligan, active in the south of Sweden in the early 1960s. A highly appreciated piece in the ongoing puzzle that is the history of Swedish experimental film. Following this Neue Sachlichkeit-related portrait of a bike, we partake in political actions and therapy sessions documented by a heat camera. We then revisit the link between Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss in a dramatic project written in exile in Sweden that was never realized. The program continues with a performance-based work in a kitchen, a visitor’s eye in the harbor of Moroccan Essaouira and a portrait of an ambassador’s wife through unveiling of entangled power relations. In the final work we are invited to listen to the soundscapes of the wandering stones in the Californian dessert. What first appears to be a dead matter comes to life before our eyes.
A form study of a bike with Neue Sachlichkeit connotation, produced within the artist network Filmligan, active in the south of Sweden in the early 1960s.… >>>
The work deals with the power and the limits of aesthetic mediation of political history, as well as the relation between political and aesthetic representation. It takes its point of departure in an unfinished script for a never-realized play, found in the archives of the National Library of Sweden, written by Bertolt Brecht during his exile in Stockholm 1939-40 with the intention to stage the Engelbrekt rebellion (a Swedish peasant uprising in the 15th century, named after its ambiguous leader Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson).… >>>
Interbeing is based on documentation of social structures and their different approaches to trust and fear. The material is presented through a thermal camera whose optics do not register what is visible to the eye but render shades of temperature, a perspective granting all living beings the same conditions of representation. The camera also makes a heat shadow visible upon and after physical touch. The heat remains, like traces of utmost commonality in attempts at making direct contact, as well as in public, everyday chance encounters.… >>>
We find ourselves in an extravagant garden in Ouagadougou. The French Ambassador’s wife dreamt about becoming a famous opera singer. Instead, she is now using the singing as a valve to survive her seemingly privileged life surrounded by workers. This film raises questions about power structures, class, intersectionality, post colonialism and feminism in a poetic, subtle and seductive way.… >>>
A desire for freedom, challenging the threat of the machine, the game comes close to the danger. Cloudy water, past and future mixed.… >>>
In Ear to the ground, the human search for truth and the conditions of human existence is investigated, reflecting how the artist perceives the land of the desert. With the use of contact microphones, vibrations from the wandering stones and the deserted landscape is absorbed.… >>>