HIGH NOON ON THE GROUND

programmed by: Fol Cinema Association

Istanbul, Directed by: Martine Rousset, 2007, 100’, 16mm, Slient

Thing, Directed by: Anouk De Clercq, 2013, 17’ video, English; Turkish subtitles

In 2007, avant-garde filmmaker Martine Rousset walked the streets of Istanbul with a 16mm camera, and made a 100 minute film called Istanbul. Images that tessellate, shine, pause and flow, sever Istanbul from its temporal context and transform it into a rhythmic cinematic experience. While stripping Istanbul from its own rhythm and image, and re-constructing time within space through his analog camera, Rousset also re-structures the image of Istanbul within the collective cultural memory.

Directed by Anouk De Clerq, Thing takes its viewers down to the depths of an architect’s mind. Using images of 3D renderings of real public spaces, the artist constructs sudden and fictional structures and invites its audience to question whether a construction is possible outside of the cultural collective memory.

Curated by Fol Cinema, ‘High Noon on the Ground’ brings together two films with different sensibilities and materials of image-building on the uniting floor that is cinema. At high noon, when the sun is at its highest and the shadows at their longest, structures and humans idly stand within memory.

MARTINE ROUSSET

İstanbul

With Istanbul, Martine Rousset puts on the brakes to the world’s movement through a cinema of deceleration. At the boundaries between image-by- image movement and optical fusion, the rhythm of the film gives way to a suspended or floating time. It is not certain that the idea of duration is more able to render a perception of the city that rather burns for intense emotion. It seems as if the camera cultivates a dreamy half-sleep. However, to this soft throbbing blends a variation of exposure as well. Therefore, at certain times, seeing becomes fragile and dangerous.

ANOUK DE CLERCQ

Thing

An architect talks about the city he has built. Gradually we realise that the city is imaginary. His account is a futile attempt to give his ideas a fixed shape. This, in a nutshell, is the story of Thing, a book and video film by artist Anouk De Clercq. In her work ‘Spatiality’ is a key concept. For Thing she talked to Professor Dirk De Meyer about buildings that have not been built, such as those of Boullée, Terragni’s Danteum, the architecture of the Futurists, Kenzo Tange’s master plan for Skopje, and so on. These suggestions of buildings are similar to the virtual spaces in her video films. This work is part of The art of ~scaping, a research project by Anouk De Clercq, funded by the Research Fund University College Ghent.