STRATA

We have been devoted to experimental performance-based filmmaking through which to examine the evolution from original documentation of performative acts toward complexly contextual, non-linear storytelling. Our film works are produced on-site as direct and visceral performances, which are never rehearsed or staged and happen in response to often extreme environments “familiar as a dream” (London City Nights) such as Antarctica, Patagonia, Kashmir, secluded areas, underground cave systems or military enclaves. We usually work alone or with a small team of collaborators and use minimal non-invasive equipment.

In a constant search through a reflexive mode for new images of interior landscapes, we consider the world our studio and host. We do not go to a place to tell a story; we go to a place to find its story. This approach contains the essential discourse of decolonisation — the land holds us; we never own land. All persons, beings, spaces, environments or non-human bodies are equal partakers in the co-creation of a film.

Our films are outcomes of broad creative experience and research processes in which we explore “thin places”—locations-in-between, where the veil between different temporalities, occurrences and stories is porous. To perform in these thresholds where the visible blends with the invisible, we have developed a psychogeographical method to activate memory and uncover layers of information and imagery stored in the human body, psyche, spirit, and environment.

In our ongoing “Poetics of Relations”, we apply endurance, sublimation and risk-taking with a poetic bodily approach to art practice and a focus on universal human experiences. We consider performance-based filmmaking an artistic practice that serves the body’s capacity to generate knowledge, convey meanings and shape concepts of intimate archiving, with the perceptual acting as a lens on how we view reality and the spectrum of relationships to address the social nature of representation. For us, film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a resourceful vessel, and reveal processes and relations by linking apparently disconnected persons, objects and happenings.

Our production process involves recollecting different elements or “shards”: a series of disconnected filmed, non-staged performance actions, poetic texts produced as stream-of-consciousness writing, foley sounds and elaborate musical soundscapes. In assembling them, these shards are placed together organically in the editing process. The new whole that is the film work aims to reveal the existing connections between these previously scattered fragments. Reduced use of digital effects such as dissolve, reverse and layering serves to unveil perceptions of realities that are not feasible in real life but that we consider elemental.

Rooted both in film history and performance art history, our aesthetic has been termed magical realism, surrealist, hyperrealist, and psychomagical. It reflects the poetic and conceptual influences of masters such as Maya Deren, Béla Tarr, Agnès Varda, Sergei Parajanov, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Godfrey Reggio or Werner Herzog.

We further commit to film as a mnemonic archive for testimonial purposes and produce conversations and interviews on existential topics with people from the arts, culture and science.