In the beginning was the sea. In her poetic and quiet experimental film, Karolina Malwina Gruschka thinks about her relationship with water, interweaving biographical memories of learning how to swim and a primal sense of physical trust with reflections on climate change. The realisation that her own body, composed of 50% water, has a lot to do with the water covering the globe, is reflected on the visual level, too: Gruschka converts found footage material and her own holiday pictures to a colour depth of 1 bit, which creates an exclusively black and white visual field where the private and documented nature are no longer distinguishable. The images ripple like water, gradually changing from distant blurs to concrete documentary observations of calving glaciers, thus achieving a meditative effect: if we all perish in the end, we will at least all be reunited in the water.

Marie Ketzscher