Hotel Globo critically examines the changing urban surface of Luanda through video, photographic and performative incursions into the interior landscapes of the 1950s Hotel Globo in Luanda, Angola. The modernist hotel is still functioning in Luanda’s downtown, whose architectural heritage has been increasingly replaced with gentrified high-rise luxury buildings.
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.
The Palace at 4 am is the experience of a fragile palace of collisions suspended in a montage vision. A hazy patchwork of structures. The Palace becomes visible only to repeatedly collapse in a liminal interference of the absence. An unrest landscape of the insight. Space-time of thresholds. This is The Palace at 4 am.
Brave new shopping worlds are being created. What have mall owners, architects, surveillance technicians, and supermarket workers done to turn human subjects into pure streams of consumers, into the perfect inhabitants of shopping mall paradise?
This is not a sight-seeing film, but a poetic journey through light and darkness reflected on the city of New York, where I often found empty spaces and times like Ma in Japanese. You do not often see the people walking on the streets or in the buildings, but you may feel the air and the light coming and going. It's not a deserted city, but a city full of energy that is there even without the people. You see the wind is blowing as the bubbles are floating over Wall Street, then up, up to the sky. The Sun sets under the Washington Bridge, where all the cars are runnin
"I brought live reptiles, birds of prey and exotic flowers to a very stereotyped and neglected section of the city of St. Louis, Missouri which suffers from from severe abandonment and despair, but also has many tranquil vacant lots where nature flourishes. I chose these birds of prey for their symbolic meaning- The bald eagle a symbol of the United States, hawks and owls are messengers. But this is not a film about St. Louis, It's about an anonymous archetype more than a specific locale. St.
Trip is inspired by the main oeuvre of architect Raine Karp--the concert hall designed for the city of Tallinn between 1975-1980. Considered the most important building realized in Estonia, Linnahall is a time capsule preserving the utopian ideas of centralized power and of egalitarian modernism, and an example of how architecture can stir public emotions in our times of corporate dominance.
Sentences is a beguiling, hypnotic meditation on the poetics of space.
3 Church Walk is a film made with writer Jonathan P. Watts and sound composer Simon Limbrick about the empty and neglected Suffolk house of modernist architect H. T. ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown.
Hub proposes that the idea of home is today perhaps better expressed as a sense of being between places. Within the dalectical interplay between global processes and local environments, Hub suggests that displacement and mobility itself might be thought of as a new way of belonging. Hub uses the transitory space of the airport—defined by its arrivals and departures—to introduce the notion of disappearance to articulate new ideas on belonging and identity.
Dó is an audio/visual synthesis between a dual screen video installation and a sound installation which was developed in collaboration with the Portuguese-Cape Verdean rapper/music composer Chullage. The video depicts a dancer gazing at the city from the top of the “Book building” in Luanda. This building which resembles a book, is emblematic of iconic modernist architecture from the 1960s. The scenario is interlaced with sound and footage of a string orchestra performing a discontinuous piece in multiple locations such as ruined spaces.
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was both a pioneer architect of the modern era and a global theorist. Fuller developed a system of geometry that he called “Energetic-Synergetic geometry,” the most famous example of which is the geodesic dome. His many designs for automobiles and living spaces were applications of a wider theory.
The Templo Mayor was the center of the Aztecs' religious life in Tenochtitlán, a ceremonial building in the heart of Mesoamerica. A center of political battles of contemporary Mexico. A ritual of resistance.
The Bats details the mating habits of flying mammals in an abandoned Mayan temple in the 14th Century.
This title is only available on Soft Science.
A montage of architecture and cabaret, juxtaposing a second hand view of New York as refracted through this artist's eyes.
This title is also available on Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.
Whether they inhabit the desert or are lost in it, three men are clearly confronted to the ruins of modern times. They are explorers or players or performers of times past. Their encounters, their moves, their assessment of location take the form of an acoustic sounding of space. Filmed in Shaabiyat al Ghurayfah in Sharjah, a repertoire of simple gestures playfully engages with structure, space, movement, threshold, surveillance and perspective.
Trip is inspired by the main oeuvre of architect Raine Karp--the concert hall designed for the city of Tallinn between 1975-1980. Considered the most important building realized in Estonia, Linnahall is a time capsule preserving the utopian ideas of centralized power and of egalitarian modernism, and an example of how architecture can stir public emotions in our times of corporate dominance.
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
Red House is an animation that playfully explores metamorphosis in relation to the stability and structure of housing. Created using the AMIGA computer console and Deluxe Paint IV software, hand drawn sequences delight in the constant reconfiguration of images, characters and forms.
Animated by Barry Doupé
With sound design by James Whitman
There is no better place to meet people than in the temporary community which gathers under a scant awning on a New York street in a downpour.
Framing the solo exhibition Prophetic Memory, this video remediates images of the NYC nonprofit art gallery, Artists Space, with the filmmaker’s grandmother's descriptions of how she would use her interior design skills to design their exhibition. Because she couldn’t travel there because of disability and the risks posed by the Covid-19 pandemic (even as this show occurred during the first wave of NYC art spaces “returning to normal"), she relies on the images she’s watching and describing to visualize her ideas.
A great example of early 1970s counter-cultural activity and the influence of Buckminster Fuller. The video, shot in Woodstock, NY in November 1971, includes footage of a communal meal being eaten in the woods, and of children playing in the mud. The video goes on to document the building of a geodesic dome. As the group works, many of them naked, they are interviewed to camera, and explain how to build a dome.
Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.
In 1966, the Syrian government's Ministry of Endowments solicited plans for a building to replace a 14th-century Mamluk mosque in Martyr's Square in the center of Damascus. A young architect proposed a design for a 5-star hotel and new mosque. In 1971, his plans were scrapped. In 1982, a building began to be built. Hospital? Parking garage? Military housing? The project--now called the Basel al-Asad Center--has been the subject of much rumor and speculation. As of 2007, the building remains unfinished.
A watchful dog in a confusion of reflected chairs begins and ends Cohen’s finely tuned observational portrait of London’s Essex Street, and the inhabitants who work the shops and throng the pavement there. People hurrying, pausing, waiting or simply standing, intermingled with worn statues of historic peerage in the slanted light of late afternoon. A man holds a copy of The Law of Privacy and the Media as though testing its resilience against the quiet onslaught of an average work day.
