a text floating on a river

“a text floating on a river” is a collaboration with poet and art historian Koivo, and based on his poem that hints at his sense of confusion being caught in-between times, spaces, and localities. It departs from his inquiry about how the architectural elements of the past manifest themselves in the everyday – in those mundane structures that support our daily lives and moves: bridges, elevated highways, and underpasses. Together with Koivo and my 16 mm camera, we walked Vienna tracing architectural residues of the grandiose ancient architecture that was transformed into the urban landscape of the modern city with the haunted history.
In our filmic inquiry, we refuse to employ a simple visual comparison in order to maintain a historical lineage. We aimed to disrupt visual clarity and representation by shooting on the expired color film stock that was later self-developed and montaged with b/w parts. Run through a DIY photochemical (cross-) process, the film strip gains its own agency in how to treat the filmed scenes: diverting colors, changing the density and contrast of images, and allowing other elements – scratches, dust, chemical residues, and etc. – to enter the frame and narration.
The materiality of the celluloid film, this non-human entity, is invited to have its own place in our dialog and dye our ideas and reflections in unexpected and unimagined colors. For us, the film becomes a space where we are fulfilling each other’s desires and trusting one another in our aspirations and interests. Together, we will depart for a cinematic errantry to practice mutuality of diverse materialities, histories, and realities, taking comfort and appreciation of our queer structure of feelings and relations, human and more-than-human.