Experimental Film

The Erosions series develops the concepts of oxidation, wear and entropy from an audiovisual and cinematographic perspective.

Other works in the Erosions series include Barranca and Viral.

A political composition on natural resistance. These images are an expiring breath in danger of extinction. These images become extinguished, consumed: a drop, a pure intensity which only appears when falling. In the presence of the image these audiovisual crowds become an affected body, assaulted by entropy. A face exhausted and reanimated by the continuous sound trance that traverses the battlefield. Faces for an eye that would not need to see.

Approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence.

–– International Film Festival Rotterdam

In 1985, Hassan Zbib and Olga Nakkas separately started to develop film scenarios based on simple narratives, and would shoot them on Super 8, which was still possible to develop in Beirut at the time. Their work featured the city as a stage where lonely characters drifted: a taxi driver in his car, a man walking around, talking to a Rambo poster.

An adaptation of the gruesome and fantastical ending chapter of the notorious experimental anti-novel Maldoror, first published in 1868 and written by a young man (who died soon after writing it) who called himself Comte De Lautréamont. A joyful return to the necessity of Super-8 film tricks, this is part of a larger Anglo-German collaborative feature film Maldoror, shot entirely on Super-8 in sections by 15 underground filmmakers working independently. Includes Super 8 Film, model animation, photo animation and live action.

Pitayas are the sacred Mesoamerican fruits that grow on Mexican nopales, an ancient plant. This is the colorful body, the vibrant blood and the radiant skin of the open life.

Cinnamon presents a glimpse into the world of African American drag racing. It follows the consistent routine of a bank teller and a mechanic as they prepare for the sport. Once the routine is disrupted, the result of the race comes into doubt. The bank teller is a driver who tries to stay focused before races. The mechanic’s job is to constantly examine the driver’s behavior. He has to adjust the racecar to the driver’s skill and ability and modify the racecar for the weather conditions.

“APP APPAP APP APAPPAP APP APP APP APAPPAPAPPAP APPAP APP”

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

Sponsored by Kodak and Chicago Filmmakers, I was given a film roll to shoot. All editing was done in-camera.

Parry Teasdale, David Cort and Chuck Kennedy visit The Kitchen in New York looking for Shirley Clarke, and bump into Steina and Woody Vasulka who are overseeing a show in progress.  A few doors down they find Shirley in her studio, dressed in white and full of energy. 

This is a rhythmic invocation of the ancestral fire, in which dazzling flames reanimate bones and natural elements. This is the shining of color.

This is a gaze of the body and a notion of spectator that the 90´s decade constructed, this is the audiovisual legacy of the 90's for our actual audiovisual control world.

The Dresden Codex is a prehispanic book that was kidnapped and was rediscovered in the city of Dresden, Germany. It keeps a presage of a destruction to come.

This is the state of mind in the post-Covid quarantine. This is the state of the images in the pandemic vortex. This is our post-Covid screen. The constant monitoring of a global demonic and satanic presence. Part of the Hauntology and Post-Covid series.

In Danza Solar, Super8 archival footage of dancers is superimposed with 16mm views of the sun (suns). The film evokes a communal solar trance, both Andean and Mesoamerican. Part of a collection of works the collective considers "Shamanic Materialism," Danza Solar is a Mesoamerican spell unleashed.

Materials: 3378 hi-con, Laser engraver, Exacto knife

Shot at the Film Farm in Mt.Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land.

Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.

The Diaspora Suite

Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capitol city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront America fantasies.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

...a "mordantly nostalgic" sojourn across America. A landscape of mute streets, empty rooms and serene fields; the remains of a civilization which has momentarily disappeared.

–– Ken Kobland

This work was restored and revised in 2022. 

A meditation on the nature of “Nature” and the uncertainty of “Cause and Effect.”

“Originally (like most of my earlier film work) this was a performance piece: text performed alongside the projected image. A complex and absurd ‘story’ about a man who thought there was something wrong with his eye. He goes to the doctor, who can’t help him much, but he finds a way he can operate on himself with uplifting yet troubling results.”

—Jennet Thomas

Super-8 and 8mm, film mattes, painting directly onto film, and model/object animation.

This is the ritual consecration to the moon, on whose eroded surface the colorful blood of the fruits is poured, which is also our pulsating blood disseminated in the celestial body of the moon. Sparkling bleeding body that crosses the dark space of our present times. Part of the Lunar Films series.

This is a fragment of the sacred lizard in desecrated times, an intermittent tour of the flashing body of the Cipactli lizard. Part of the Cipactli series.

This is Rothko's haunted painting and its circular detour. Bloody suppuration and enchanted absorption as an omen in times of pandemic vortex.

An audiovisual experience of the current Mexican war.