disburden me of time (2021), 4:18 minutes.
Walter Benjamin's elegiac sonnet for his friend Christoph Friedrich Heinle, a poet who killed himself a few days after the start of the first world war:
Disburden me of Time from which thou’rt vanished
And of thy presence free me from within
As in the twilight hours red roses free themselves
From all mere marriedness of things
The heartfelt homage and the bitter voice
I forego calmly and thy burning lips
And yet more burning brow enshaded purple
Just below the black gleam of thy hair
So may that image fail me too of praise
And ire which thou wouldst offer
Underway while very like a prince
Thou didst the banner bear its symbol to unriddle
Plant in me thy sacred Name instead
Name without image Amen without end.
the angels sat on spiked benches (2021), 0:40 minutes, loop.
The feeling of looking and two adjacent stories about the tension of the future.
Fantasy Stain, first cut (2020), 2:30 minutes.
"Butterflies and bees are on the way and rabbits pop out of their holes to unnerve us with their rapid-fire blinking. Fantasy stains the approaching air like the eddy of a fuck-you said out of love, so warm you don’t savor it: it savors you. This genre of the world jolt makes episodes possible. Meanwhile, I whisper, 'Life’s a racket,' to the playground kids lolling all nutsy and tilt-headed, but why? Their loose play’s about to lose out to this sharp tongue, that police tape, this dirty wash, that bad listener, and the daily perp walk to work, that’s why." "Everyday Life in Early Spring" from The Hundreds by Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant.
Geocities (2020), 5 min.
A short video hoping to lead to some thoughts about what the relationship is between nostalgia and utopia in the context of the internet, using geocities gifs as an archive. In order to place my video, I offer this necessarily polemical series of notes on the internet, life, and art. It contains hyperlinks throughout to try to highlight the fluid and relational nature that the internet as medium often takes. Music owned by Windows 96.
Dream Soil (2020), 3:50 min.
Haptic vision, memory as a forced regurgitation; differences between motion and expression; shitty video of something on fire. It's a moment in time which. Another boy walks into frame.
Juvenilia (2019), 47:00.
“I have never, never been able to figure it all out. What it’s all about, what it all means. So when I began now to put all these rolls of film together, to string them together, the first idea was to keep them chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance, the way I found them on the shelf. Because I really don’t know where any piece of my life really belongs. Let it be, let it go, just by pure chance, disorder. There is some kind of order in it, order of its own, which I do not really understand, same as I never understood life around me, the real life, as they say, or the real people, I never understood them. I still do not understand them, and I do not really want to understand them.“ - Jonas Mekas, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
“People everywhere wish their own life, with all its dark places that they sense, to be an experience not only lived, but presented.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. “ - Michel Foucault
“The man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.” - Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2.
Full artist statement.
Genesis (2018), 0:35 min.
A series of stills animated to evoke winter.