Private Project

Aka 赤 (Red)

Aka 赤 (Red) is a chromatic immersion: material accretion on 16mm leader, a 30-meter continuous topology, a kinetic stratigraphy of saturated crimsons and high-intensity magentas.

The sound mass was composed from contact microphone recordings of shinkansen (bullet-trains), bypassing acoustic air to capture the structural vibration of the vessel from within. Haptic and cavernous, these frequencies converge with the image into a single resonant body.

  • Abinadi Meza
    Director
  • Abinadi Meza
    Producer
  • Abinadi Meza
    Composer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    November 1, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    Mexico
  • Country of Filming:
    Japan
  • Language:
    No Dialogue
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Distribution Information
  • Film-Makers’ Cooperative / New American Cinema Group (New York)
    Distributor
Director Biography - Abinadi Meza

Abinadi Meza is a Latinx-Indigenous (Otomí - México) artist, filmmaker, and composer. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR). His practice reconfigures cinema as a site of physical and acoustic contact. Using hand-layered 16mm processes, Meza creates an elemental cinema where the film substrate functions as a tactile, metabolic, and synesthetic document.

Meza employs radiophonic signal, electromagnetic phenomena, and frequency interference to develop integrated compositions where sound and image unfold as a resonant body. He utilizes electronic sound masses to produce chromatic depth and luminous transparency; vibrational forces generate dimensional architecture. Through this materialist investigation of thresholds, the work triggers a perceptual sublime.

His media works have been presented at the Walker Art Center, MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, and Blaffer Art Museum. Meza’s films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Cineteca Nacional de México, FACT Liverpool, MCA Santa Barbara, and international festivals including art + film + vienna, Crossroads, Kasseler Dokfest, and the Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF). His work is distributed by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York.

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Director Statement

Aka 赤 (Red) is a memory portal. Of the works in my current Elemental Cinema series, it is the one most fully entered by the body and by Butoh. The 30-meter filmstrip is not photographic. It is an accretion of time, color, and environment. It is pressed, handled, and lived with. My training under Akira Kasai and Yumiko Yoshioka shapes this contact. Kasai's body of light: the film substrate as a light-bearing body, the accretion of color as something luminous rather than merely pigmented. Yoshioka's resonance framework: the visual body and the sonic body in mutual vibration. The body as a site of transformation, crisis, and memory. The film substrate, treated as such a body, carries a forensic index of its own duration. The result is a monolithic, continuous topology with no interior cuts. Vascular morphological patterns and ink-drop topographies produce a dense stratigraphy of saturated crimsons and high-intensity magentas.

The sound mass was composed almost entirely from contact microphone recordings of shinkansen. Bypassing acoustic air to capture structural vibration, these recordings yield something haptic and ethereal: the internal metabolism of speed, the resonance of passage through tunnel and time. Aka 赤 (Red) resolves as a passage between seeing and dreaming, where the distance between the retina and the signal is eliminated.