Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 21

Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 21

This week we’ve selected three films because of the way they foreground textiles. Films in which colours and textures are presented to the camera and fabrics are reflected in musical phrases.

Before her feature film The Grand Bizarre premiered last year, Jodie Mack has been working for several years on animated films which testify to a keen interest in motifs and weavings from all over the world. Her films are almost like an ethnological sample book of cultural patterns. Blanket Statement #1: Home is Where the Heart is (2012) shows the superposition of different fabrics with various prints at an accelerated rate, constituting, in the words of Mack, a "discordant dysfunction".

Meredith Monk is mainly known as a musician and trailblazer for combining acoustic singing techniques with performance. Many of her pieces reinterpret folkloristic or ancient melodies, while at the same time hinting at futurism. Her film Book of Days (1989) taps into this blending of cultural timelines. Actors and singers are performing facing the camera directly, presenting their stories and songs just like in folkloristic village-theatre. Take, for instance, the scene at the churchyard fair where anachronistic presenters reveal simple musical tableaus by using a checkered quilt as a theatre curtain.

The German artist Ulla von Brandenburg is clearly indebted to Monk, as her work echoes the theatrical and the ritualistic representation of people singing and moving through spaces in unison. In 2020, she was invited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to create an exhibition. She presented an installation consisting of a series of drapes, creating a theatrical space where layers of coloured textiles generated spatial rhythms. The show was accompanied by the film Le milieu est bleu, in which characters perform abstracted gestures with pieces of cloth and strings’, speak-singing while the camera glides through space, revealing a colourful fan of sensations.

Statement #1: Home is Where the Heart is (Jodie Mack, 2012) is available for free on Vimeo
Book of Days (Meredith Monk, 1989) is available for rent on Vimeo
Le milieu est bleu (Ulla von Brandenburg, 2020) is available for free on Youtube

Online Selection
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12 Apr 2021 - 18 Apr 2021