"There in front on the right and then on the left, we say to the driver, because we are looking for the middle. We are setting off for an area that lies exactly between the points that we have linked with images in our brains. To the east is China, to the north Russia, to the southwest Iran.""Kazbekistan - The Shining Plains" is an essay film based on a trip to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Rebecca Himmerich is an artist living in Düsseldorf with a focus on audio work. Trained at the Institute for Music and Media, she is active in various band formations as a composer, electric bassist and pianist. Her path led her via the music high school in Montabaur, to a voluntary service in South India, then to Cologne for studies in music and Asian studies, and finally to Düsseldorf at the Robert Schumann University. Her work consists mainly of radio plays and video works. They are based on interviews, field recordings and experimental texts, which she combines with music and sound. Her main focus of attention and listening is always on in-between spaces and explores gray and transitional zones. Travel reports then become experimental audio pieces or documentary films. Her curiosity takes Rebecca Himmerich to remote places with strange stories, for which she finds an original and unusual form.
RI04: Inge, raise us from the dead! Is a 20 minute experimental arthouse short film, that is based on and inspired by the poems of German post-war and DDR poet Inge Mueller. After having been buried by debris for three days in 1945, the motif of burial ran through her life until Mueller eventually committed suicide in 1966. Inge Mueller's poems accurately describe the traumatic reality of a post-war society that was confronted with a loss of god as a moral instance and a loss of self. Combining surrealist with realist documentary aesthetics, the film „Inge, raise us from the dead!“ stars a middle-aged woman named Ms M., who lives in a suburb of a city somewhere in Germany. Since some time, the woman is having a recurring dream, in which she is buried by debris. While the image is constantly shifting between the everyday scenery in the woman's apartment and a fictional almost delusional green filtered version of that apartment, the performer’s life somehow seems to be connected to Inge Mueller’s afterlife. Between interview excerpts, sequences that refer back to Brecht’s instructive plays and the radio as a time channel machine, the film raises questions concerning loneliness, age, womenhood, mental health, suicide ad freedom. Inge Mueller’s poems become a timeless science fiction technology to question the present. „I can‘t stand without a floor. Only sing. Up somewhere at the bottom. Who is the hunter, who is the prey? Where is one, one so. Who makes alive what is too dead for her. And wants to live differently???“ (Inge Mueller)
Lila-Zoé Krauß is a multimedia artist that was born in Alice Springs and grew up in Hamburg. After her studies at HFBK Hamburg and the California Institute of the Arts, she currently lives and works in Berlin. Under the pseudonym L Twills she has developed different projects like album productions, video art, experimental short films, sound installations, concerts and radiophonic compositions. In 2020 her full length debut album [Freedom/Fiction] was released on vinyl. Thematically Krauss aims to explore the body as a venue for power and its multi-sensory entaglements with memory and music.
A love poem by Ernst Jandl is the basis for a musical„Tête-à-tête“ between a Dresden woman and a Martian. In a rental car it comes fast to a rushing love scene, which ends in total chaos in the environment of a violent Monday demo.
Peter Böving, born in Mülheim/Ruhr, trained as a woodworker, has lived in Thuringia since 2001. Since the mid-1980s freelance as a musician, filmmaker, composer and producer in the fields of film, theater and audio books. Extensive tours (among others through the Goethe-Instituts) with own literary programs in Central and Eastern Europe. Advertising film productions (Viral) between 2007 and 2011. With the founding of the Klötzchenkinos (2010) he conquers as an independent filmmaker (with over 50 international film awards so far) ceaselessly the world of animated film.https://www.kloetzchenkino.de/2019/02/22/derunddie/
I would call it sunshine if it weren't so shady under the cloud of smoke.
Celi Kay, 21 years old, born in Upper Styria.
In Linz for 7 years.
Art is the only thing I live for.
I think a name should be the artist's only category.
So it would be a waste of time to talk about my life.
But if you can feel it in my works. PLEASE.
We see a webcam surveillance shot of a harbor entrance on a foggy day in Cuxhaven, Germany. The sound of a fog horn fades into the soundtrack, a contemporary composition for his trombone by Paul Hubweber. Ships slowly approach and the first stanza of the poem Fog Horns by Colorado poet David Mason slowly appears in written form first. These three elements - webcam image, poem, trombone music - appear in the video as if they were always meant to be together....
Ebba Jahn, graduate of Deutsche Film+TV Akademie Berlin (dffb) 198416 mm films, production, camera, sound, editingTeacher at dffb 1988-91.Moved to New York 1991-2008.BA Art Studies at CUNY 1996-99. 2008 Artist Grant Film/Video from Berlin Senate Culture. DVDs ARTS INTERPLAY until 2012. art production, traveling exhibitions until video Paper Pairs & Trombone, Paul Hubweber HD 28' 2018. since 2019 change focus to short video collages. http://www.ebbajahn.de/
Haiku | 俳句" is a symphonic audiovisual project for two Japanese performers, alternating percussion groups, soundscapes and rhythmicized video sequences. The film is an experimental approach to pay tribute to the extraordinary art of Japanese haiku poetry.
Director Statement: I first came into contact with haiku poetry in my youth. In a small library. There was a book with selected haiku by the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō containing the original Japanese version and an English translation. Probably then, the fascination for this extraordinary poetry seems to have embedded itself somewhere inside me.The real dimension of haiku poetry only became clear to me while visiting Japan for the first time years later. The untouched, partly wild nature in Japan has an almost spiritual attraction. At that time, as a composer, I asked myself whether it is possible to capture these wonderful impressions in an abstract haiku that does not consist of words and syllables, but of music, text and photographic events. This is how the idea came about for the current project.However, the implementation should take a few more years. In order to be able to select suitable traditional Japanese haiku for the film project in terms of content and sound, it was initially essential to fully learn all the official Japanese characters called kanji in order to be able to research in Japanese databases at all. A really difficult learning session! For example, Kobayashi Issa, one of the four great haiku poets whose haiku I use in the film project, wrote more than 20,000 haiku. At first it looked as if it would be an almost impossible undertaking to find the suitable thematic texts for the film. So, it took several months to create the script for the film. Following the typical structure of a traditional Japanese haiku the film contains 17 specific events divided in three parts of 5, 7 and again 5 units. All these events are built and derived from original Japanese haiku, contemporary text sequences, sound patterns, rhythmicized video sequences or pure music sections. In their entirety they create a kind of abstract and virtual “hyper-haiku” including a typical “seasonal” and “cutting word” called kigo and kireji.
Martin Gerigk (*1972) is a composer of contemporary music. His repertoire includes compositions for orchestra and chamber music, as well as several solo concertos. His compositions are performed nationally and internationally including in Korea, Japan, USA, England, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. In this context he works together with renowned international soloists and ensembles.In addition to his compositional work he is known for his remarkable audiovisual art and experimental films which focus on inherent synesthetic connections of sound and visual perceptions. Besides creating interwoven aural and visual landscapes of music, nature sounds and video sequences one important aspect of his art is the illustration of the hidden poetry of nature phenomena and sciences.