An empty room floats weightlessly in the dark. Its three walls glow, displaying abstract movements. Are they projected inventions or is there a world behind them? At least this quiet, disquieting in-between place, this empty stage, offers time to dream: A ride “no brakes downhill” (Tin Fingers) that passes a flight of stairs, a petrol station, a panorama window. Anton Cla designs a mystically charged architecture of the imaginary, whose statics are calculated from light, sound, movement and the manipulation of time.

André Eckardt

 

Cara terra, dear Earth! This sensual cinematic love letter is directed to the Earth, to the fields of the Arvaia Cooperative close to Bologna to be more precise. There, they sow, harvest, water and tend to the plants with dedication and without the use of large-scale industrial machinery. People here are just fleeting presences: Emma Harris places the visual focus entirely on the flora, from the soil to the buds, from wide shots of the horizon to the overlapping branches and leaves which become just more abstract structures to joyfully lose oneself in. Her loving, precise gaze is also captured in textual form: delivered by two voices, the love letter is not just a huge thank you to the Earth, but also the expression of a desire that humans don’t work against, but rather with nature in the future. It’s entirely in line with these ethical, agroecological considerations that “Errabonda” was made by way of analogue processes low in harmful substances.

Marie Ketzscher

The legacy: grandfather’s collection of bird’s eggs. 4,500 graceful, fragile works of art created by nature; speckled, elongated, pastel-coloured … An orderly confined enclosure of uniform boxes houses the preserved cocoons of the stolen, thwarted offspring of birds of prey and non-predatory birds, from Norway to South Africa. With the legacy comes the story of the collector: Josef Schreiber from Vorarlberg, Central Europe – a middle-class, white, male biography of the 20th century in which order was lost, slipped, had to be reimagined, both on the grand scale and on the smallest private level. Claudia Larcher’s extraordinary essay film is an unflustered tale of restlessness. Personal photos, views of collection pieces and small AI-generated miniatures are overlaid by electronic sounds that seem to communicate with the algorithms of the shell patterns, and a spoken line of thought that traces, sorts and keeps together almost 100 years of change with breathtaking clarity.

André Eckardt