SWEDENBORG FILM FESTIVAL 2018

Astronauts with Wheat (4 mins 40)

Made under the tutelage of George Kuchar, with his main actress Linda Martinez, this is the story of a woman who tries to return to the aliens who abducted her so she can reconnect with her husband. Exploring correspondential states between the organic and the synthetic, the film is inspired by an experiment at a space station, where it was found that simply spending time with a pot of wheat lessened the depression of the astronauts who lived there.

JON BRYANT CRAWFORD is a Guyanese American from Arkansas who lives in California. He holds an MFA from UCLA’s TFT and a BA in pre-1800 British Literature from Hendrix College. He is a Film Independent Fellow, Short of the Week Alum, Smithsonian History in Film Fellow, Stonewall Award Winner, Crosstown Arts Residency Fellow, Indie Memphis Fellow and Artios Award Nominee. Jon Bryant Crawford’s film, writing and photography explore the loneliness of American masculinity and the celebration of Queer resilience.

Website: www.jonbryantcrawford.com

MARTIN DEL CARPIO

Mother’s Milk (2 mins 35)

I’ve always been intrigued by my mother’s hands as a child. As she has aged, I’ve been fascinated even more by them. I feel they’re a combination of being refined, but yet of the working class. For my first-ever short film, I wanted her to showcase with only the hands what is most vital to her in her life now, and the spirituality coexisting with the harsh reality that comes with old age.

MARTIN DEL CARPIO is a music and film artist whose work is marked by experimentation, the search of new concepts, sounds and melodies, by a fascination with lyrics and the journey that music takes us on. Martin’s albums include In Absentia (2007), Pequeño Pionero (2008), X(2011), Godard (2013) and Involution (2018), inspired by his mother’s passing. Aside from music, Martin has worked on numerous experimental film projects of his own such as The Antiteater of Ten, Mother’s Milk, I…dreaming and The Alluring Sway.

Website: https://martindelcarpio.bandcamp.com |  Instagram: @martin_del_carpio

JAMES EDMONDS

A Return (3 mins 06)

The geography of origin becomes a catalyst for an inner realignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. A series of rapid contrasts—sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance—A Return creates a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience. Structures shift and intermingle, and two worlds become one.

JAMES EDMONDS is an artist/filmmaker from the UK living in Berlin. His work manifests in analogue films, painted gestures and long-form soundworks, occasionally combined along with found objects or materials to create immersive environments. He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various venues, project spaces, galleries and cinema events, including Âge d’Or Festival, Brussels; Process Festival, Latvia; Fronteira Festival, Brazil; 3 137, Athens (with Petra Graf); Macao, Milan; Ausland, Berlin; and Another Vacant Space, Berlin. Since 2015 he also curates the film series Light Movement in Berlin.

Website: www.jamesedmonds.org | Instagram: @knowingthedrill

KEIRA GREENE

x comme x (3 mins 06)

The poem x comme x gives voice to ‘The Words’. The words are calling for an uprising; tired of not belonging to their form they seek a Utopia where language is the ‘place’ of no place. x comme xhas been translated into French in collaboration with Fatima Djabri, whose voice we hear over a still image of an intercom.

KEIRA GREENE works across moving image and performance. Her practice questions embodied research as a methodology, often explored through the moving body and writing, often becoming a film. She is concerned with deconstructing language and the translation of text and image as scores; she works closely with dance and dancers to develop her research. She has exhibited and screened her work widely with recent exhibitions and screenings including Cubitt, Jerwood Space, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate, and The Commons, Bolinas ca. She regularly collaborates with Susannah Haslam, Jess Bunch and Tash Cox as the collective Co—. She is performance curator for Whitstable Biennale and a founding trustee of the Stuart Croft Foundation.

Website: www.keiragreene.com  | Instagram: @keiralgreene  | Twitter: @KeiraGreene

OONA GRIMES

u. e u. (Installation, Basement Light Well, 9 mins 26)

A sublime dance of miscommunication and mistranslation. I chased language—both the learning and losing of it—the omissions, the torn, the discontinuity, the patches, the bad repairs… With a nod to Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini.

OONA GRIMES is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London and the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. She is the Bridget Riley Fellow at the British School at Rome 2018. She received her Fine Art BA Hons from the Norwich School of Art and a Fine Art: Higher Diploma from Slade School of Fine Art. She is represented by Danielle Arnaud contemporary art.

Website: www.oonagrimes.com | Instagram: @grimesoona

ATOBE HIROSHI

House (1 min)

This film is a suggestion for corresponding music and light, material and feelings, mind and evidence.

ATOBE HIROSHI is a graduate from Seian University of Art and Design. Atobe is an experimental filmmaker mainly interested in the kinetic behaviour of household commodities and electrical products. Screenings and exhibitions include ‘Water : Take’ 1, California, USA (2016); Moving-Image-Arts International Short Film Festival, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada (2017); ‘Best Experimental Short Award’ at the Buddha International Film Festival, Pune, India (2017); and So Limitless And Free Film Festival, Beaubien Theatre, Montreal, Canada (2017).

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/atobehiroshi

ANDREW KÖTTING

Their Rancid Words Stagnate Our Ponds (8 mins 36)

In a hinterland within the ‘elsewhere’, a lone character meanders in search of meaning and understanding. Hither and dither doth he wander reflecting upon all things that came before and all things hereafter.

ANDREW KÖTTING made his first feature film Gallivant in 1996—a nine-month journey around the coast of Britain on which he was accompanied by his grandmother Gladys and daughter Eden. Subsequent feature films, installations and performances include This Filthy Earth, Ivul, Mapping Perception, In The Wake of a Deadad, This Our Still Life, Swandown, By Our Selvesand Edith Walks. The final part of his Earthworks trilogy, Lek And The Dogs was released in June 2018 by HOME. He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the French Pyrenees.

Website: www.andrewkotting.com

MOX MÄKELÄ

Host Sapiens (Installation, 2nd Floor Wynter Room, 15 mins 21)

Mass extinction is here. Our plate will soon be bigger than our planet. Our choice.

MOX MÄKELÄ lives and works in Finland and is a conceptual artist whose work has been shown widely at international film and art festivals. In her ecocritical films and installations, Mäkelä examines the clash between nature and human nature within the marine milieu. Another part of her oeuvre is ‘idiot ibidem’, a long-term extended project that studies a literary historical chain of events with full methodological freedom and diversity.

Website: http://shepherdsbanknet.blogspot.com

DIANE NERWEN

Where the Truth Lies (Installation, Basement Stairway, 4 mins 12)

Subverting notions of correspondences, Where the Truth Lies is a found-footage collage poem for absurd times. Disparate images, sounds and texts collide in a world of trickery and deception.

DIANE NERWEN is a video artist and media arts educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings at the Berlin Film Festival; the Museum of Modern Art, ny; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; and the Tate Modern, London. Her work has been supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Creative Capital Foundation. She was awarded a DAAD Artist in Residence Fellowship in Berlin in 2001. Her work is distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago and Vtape, Toronto. Nerwen was born in Montreal and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Website: www.dianenerwen.com

JAMES NORTON

Correspondances (2 mins)

Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet is translated into English and video; a devoted homage and lurid travesty of the Symbolist romantic imagination, hallucinating the present where beauty and sensuality are menaced by anger and laughter.

JAMES NORTON is a semi-Canadian supplier of historical entertainment programmes to leading terrestrial and satellite broadcasters and was twice runner-up in the World Winter Swimming Championships. He began his career as an assistant on films by Derek Jarman, Terence Davies and Sally Potter before researching and producing for series such as Arena, Imagine and The South Bank Show. His short films have been shown at the V&A Museum, the Venice Biennale and the Centre Pompidou. His documentary Morecambe and Wise in America premieres on the UK Gold channel this Christmas.

Twitter: @cineswimmer

LOUIZA NTOUROU

To G.K. (2 mins 25)

Filmed during the summer on the Greek Island of Amorgos, To G.K. is a short film/letter about limitations, and correspondences between reality and the imaginary. Through the interchange of light and darkness, inside and outside, or even freedom and limitation, the film tries to capture the in-between space whose view is subject to the breeze. The accompanying music track echoes from the past and the very depth of the room where the camera finally appears to be located.

LOUIZA NTOUROU‘s work focuses in capturing the moment and space where different realities meet, intersect and interchange; the space, where the paradox resides, in the absurdness and contradictions lying beneath the human existence. Informed by psychoanalysis and anthropology, her latest films explore and raise questions regarding the ‘lost object’ on an individual and social level, the remote space the latter leaves behind and its role in the construction of personal and social identity.

JULIAN OLARIU

Before Jellyfish (4 mins 32)

In India, a labourer creates in his mind the Nebula Jellyfish. Fragments of this experience and memories correspond and interfere in a dreamlike narrative, where imagination gets ahead of reality.

JULIAN OLARIU lives and works in Paris. His film works have been selected for The Artists Forum Festival of The Moving Image, NY; Barcelona International Short Film & Video Festival; Defy Film Festival, Nashville, TN. Also working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installations, Olariu has exhibited at Paris White Night, installation, Cloître des Billettes, Paris (2015); Phaedra § Ellipse, Cloître des Billettes, Paris (2014); Galerie Marie Vitoux, Paris (1992-2006); and Romanian Pavilion of the Universal Exhibition of Seville (1990).

Website: www.julian-olariu.com

ANNETTE PHILO

White Point (4 mins)

White Point explores the crossover between the technical process of recording image and sound and the expressive gestures which emerge, when both are combined with the spoken word. The Scottish writer Dorothy Alexander, performs her response to the film in her Scots tongue.

ANNETTE PHILO is a London based, artist film maker. Her early practice was in fine painting and sculpture. Since her MA, at City and Guilds of London Art School (2008), she has worked in digital media and film. She is interested in conveying expressions of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s figural space.

Website: www.annettephilo.co.uk

JON RATIGAN

The Curtain is like the Sea (1 min 34)

In this film-poem, shot with a toy Fisher-Price camera, the artist explores correspondences between his window curtain and the sea.

JON RATIGAN is a moving image artist and painter based in South Wales, UK. His work explores the crossover themes of dreams and language and often involves the notion of ‘place’. He frequently uses analogue equipment to acquire image and sound, and has recently started experimenting with using old, low-resolution toy cameras. He has screened work at many festivals including Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Scotland; and Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque.

Website: www.jonratigan.com

VICTORIA SKOGSBERG

Spirits necessarily dwell in a place (4 mins 36)

Based on Emanuel Swedenborg’s theory that everything in the material world relates to its source in a spiritual reality, Spirits necessarily dwell in a place shows a series of images of places, details of interiors, exteriors and landscapes. A voice speaks to us, as subtitles inform us about dying and the spiritual state.

VICTORIA SKOGSBERG is an artist based in Stockholm. Skogsberg’s practice is based around her interest in existential, spiritual and psychical experiences, in relation to atmosphere, spatiality and the psychology of space. Based on her artistic research into this interest, Skogsberg develops film installation works, including the moving image, sculptural structures, photographic and screen print works. Victoria’s work has been shown both in Sweden and internationally, most recently in Auckland, London, Bergen and Athens.

Website: www.victoriaskogsberg.com | Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user3430982

JOHN SMITH

Song for Europe (4 mins)

An underwater celebration of Britain’s connection to mainland Europe.

JOHN SMITH studied at the Royal College of Art. Since 1972 he has made over fifty film, video and installation works that have been shown in art galleries and independent cinemas around the world. He received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011, and in 2013 he was the winner of Film London’s Jarman Award. Recent solo exhibitions include Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2017); Kate MacGarry, London (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2015); Centre d’Art Contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, Paris (2014); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2012) and Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen (2012).

Website: www.johnsmithfilms.com  | Instagram: @theotherjohnsmith

ALCAEUS SPYROU

Anina (19 mins 51)

Shot on board a container ship, the camera embarks on a psycho-geographic journey of a centuries-old trade route, documenting the vast industrial landscape and the shadows it brings to life. Is violence the thriving behaviour in these harbours? Do these machines that hunt and devour bury their dead? Are they conscious of killing and ruin?

ALCAEUS SPYROU is a lens-captured visual artist, researching the cinematic image and the psyche of contemporary migration. Born in Elbasan, Albania and raised in Athens, Greece, his migrant upbringing would focus his gaze towards shifting landscapes. He studied BA Fine Art at Middlesex University in London and has been awarded the John Walker Prize for outstanding academic achievement. Alcaeus’ work has been widely presented in numerous exhibitions such as Liverpool Biennial; Bloomberg New Contemporaries; European Media Art Festival; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Nunnery Gallery, London; IndieLisboa International Film Festival; and Athens Avant Garde Film Festival among others.

Website: www.alcaeusspyrou.com |  Instagram: @alcaeusspyrou

JOHN STRUTTON

Minotaur (6 mins 51)

An empty iPhone box is used to create the architecture of a labyrinth into which the viewer is drawn through a series of corresponding images, weaving in and out of hell, Paradise, and the Tower of Babel.

JOHN STRUTTON‘s practice for the past several years has focused on a collection of under-5-minute videos made on mobile phones. Painting, drawing, collage and lo-fi animation are used to construct imagery which interleaves with sound and music drawn from a long-standing collaboration between Strutton’s band Arthur Brick and electronic musician Riccardo Carbone. The growing collection of these films form the basis of a YouTube channel and Instagram page and have been screened and presented in public venues such as the De La Warr Pavilion and MK Gallery as well as part of solo and group exhibitions/performances in the UK and Europe.

Website: www.johnstrutton.com | Instagram:@johnstrutton66 | Youtube: John Strutton

HUANGZHI TANG

ID (3 mins 07)
ID is an experimental animation about the ego (who you are in this society) and the id (the primary instincts). Transcending routine life into the subconscious world, ID is inspired by dreams, using collage animation to deconstruct and reform visual metaphors and correspondences.

HUANGZHI TANG earned a bachelor’s degree in visual communication design at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University in China. After which, Huangzhi worked as a graphic designer at Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House and Must-have Gifts & Stationery. In 2016, Huangzhi went abroad to the US and in 2018 she has successfully obtained a master’s degree in visual communication design at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Website: https://huangzhitang.com/ | Instagram: @ tang_house_tang

SHARON WHOOLEY

Distance (13 mins 30)
PLEASE NOTE: contains rapidly moving imagery

Distance tells a story about time in a specific place, Glenbride in Co. Wicklow in Ireland, from three temporal perspectives: that of a woman, a house and a mountain. Inspired in part by the ideas of Scottish writer and poet Nan Shepherd (‘Thirty years in the life of a mountain is nothing—the flicker of an eyelid’) we also echo James Joyce’s words ‘Places Remember Events’ and unearth the faint but perceptible traces left in the landscape.

SHARON WHOOLEY has worked in film for over 20 years, as co-director of Harvest Films, she was co-writer with Pat Collins and Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde on the feature films Silence (2012) and Song of Granite (2017). They are currently writing a new film The Aran Islands based on John Millington Synge’s book of the same name. Since 2013 she has started to direct her own films: Fathom (2013), a meditation on thinking and isolation based on the Fastnet Lighthouse; and Nettle Coat (2014) on visual artist Alice Maher’s work of the same name. In 2016 she directed a short film on the Irish/German sculptor Imogen Stuart. Distance (2018) is her fourth film as director.

Website: www.harvestfilms.ie  | Twitter: @harvest__films

OONA GRIMES

u. e u. (Installation, Basement Light Well, 9 mins 26)

A sublime dance of miscommunication and mistranslation. I chased language—both the learning and losing of it—the omissions, the torn, the discontinuity, the patches, the bad repairs… With a nod to Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini.

OONA GRIMES is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London and the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. She is the Bridget Riley Fellow at the British School at Rome 2018. She received her Fine Art BA Hons from the Norwich School of Art and a Fine Art: Higher Diploma from Slade School of Fine Art. She is represented by Danielle Arnaud contemporary art.

Website: www.oonagrimes.com | Instagram: @grimesoona

ALCAEUS SPYROU

Anina (19 mins 51)

Shot on board a container ship, The camera embarks on a psycho-geographic journey of a centuries-old trade route, documenting the vast industrial landscape and the shadows it bring to life.

By embarking on a journey of a centuries-old trade route, the narrative embraces the constant rhythm of trading ships, and cartographs the unfolding industrial landscape. In the ports, the fluresquent light, the shadows it bring to life, point to stories of work, play, dignity and survival. Does the inherited malevolence in the cycle of a mechanical action, hold a universal footprint about its ramifications? Is violence the thriving behaviour in these harbours? Machines that hunt and devour. Do they bury their dead? Are they conscious of killing and ruin?

ALCAEUS SPYROU is a lens-captured visual artist, researching the cinematic image and the psyche of contemporary migration. Born in Elbasan, Albania and raised in Athens, Greece, his migrant upbringing would focus his gaze towards shifting landscapes. He studied BA Fine Art at Middlesex University in London and has been awarded the John Walker Prize for outstanding academic achievement. Alcaeus’ work has been widely presented in numerous exhibitions such as Liverpool Biennial; Bloomberg New Contemporaries; European Media Art Festival; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Nunnery Gallery, London; IndieLisboa International Film Festival; and Athens Avant Garde Film Festival among others.

Website: www.alcaeusspyrou.com |  Instagram: @alcaeusspyrou

ANDREW KÖTTING

Their Rancid Words Stagnate Our Ponds (8 mins 36)

In a hinterland within the ‘elsewhere’, a lone character meanders in search of meaning and understanding. Hither and dither doth he wander reflecting upon all things that came before and all things hereafter. The work is a companion piece to Kötting’s latest feature film Lek and the Dogs and was shot in the Atacama desert in Chile. Produced to run on a loop in a gallery ‘space’ the film exemplifies Kötting’s ability to take an idea and run with it until it spills over into the expanded cinematic ‘elsewhere’. With the beguiling presence of French performance artist Xavier Tchili and sublime cinematography by Nick Gordon-Smith the work is designed to be experienced within the pitch black and the sound up high.

ANDREW KÖTTING made his first feature film Gallivant in 1996—a nine-month journey around the coast of Britain on which he was accompanied by his grandmother Gladys and daughter Eden. Subsequent feature films, installations and performances include This Filthy Earth, Ivul, Mapping Perception, In The Wake of a Deadad, This Our Still Life, Swandown, By Our Selvesand Edith Walks. The final part of his Earthworks trilogy, Lek And The Dogs was released in June 2018 by HOME. He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the French Pyrenees.

Website: www.andrewkotting.com