There is an area of audiovisual production that has always preferred broken word, timelessness, a-logical relations and spatial alteration. A rough ode to the non-fictional production
The dreamified: a non-fictional branch of audiovisual production
There is an area of audiovisual production that, by daring a comparison with the literary sphere, is to classic and mainstream cinema as poetry is to the novel and prose in general. A production of non-fiction that — in contrast to the rest of the story, dialogues, temporal sequentiality and spatial contiguity — has always preferred broken word, evocative sound, timelessness, a-logical relations and spatial alteration.
That, instead of concentrating on the fictional and conventional reproduction of reality, its facts and its plots, has chosen to give space to the game of the imagination, to the idea of the ‘as if’, to the construction of worlds that differ from the known standard where that which is contained and signified often takes the form of dreams and, therefore, of the ‘dreamified’.
The universe of moving images
In what is conventionally referred to by scholars in the field as the ‘universe of moving images,’ looking in the direction of experimental images — which range from works in film to the electronic arts — means going in search of that precise magmatic and multifaceted production that has progressively moved into the dimension of the beyond: beyond the mainstream, beyond big productions, beyond big distributions, and away from the mass spectator market.
The Seventh Art – differing art forms and languages
We might say that these are niche products — chiseled, finely woven, carefully embroidered images — that offer observers and spectators a viewing experience that goes beyond classical cinematic language and codes and that, as was mentioned at the beginning of the text in hyperbolic proportion, are to film as poetry is to the novel; or, to stay on theme, as a product of high artistic craftsmanship is to industrial-scale production.
Museum institutions, galleries, art biennials, events, film festivals and reviews are the places to look for these kinds of heterogeneous productions that hybridize differing art forms and languages (music, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, theater, animation etc.), arranging themselves on the border of the ‘Seventh Art’ and in the midst of the aesthetic experiences of the contemporary métissage.
Experimental works – the female artistic production
This experimental area also includes the productions of male and female artists who work with an approach that originates from certain craft practices, employing different techniques and materials that are transformed, enriched and expanded within short films or video works.
With female artistic production, whatever the field of reference — be it the figurative arts or audiovisual writing — we often come across analyses that call into question the ancient, traditional crafts: spinning, warping, weaving, and the ancient mythologies that serve as a backdrop to these universes and refer to a woman who is patient, industrious, tenacious, attentive, and silent.
Maria Lai, Annette Messager, and Hella Jongerius
If, for contemporary figurative arts, it is easier to identify personalities who have been able to give the craftsmanship experience new meaning and aesthetic forms that adhere to today’s sensibility — I am thinking of Maria Lai, Annette Messager, and Hella Jongerius to mention but a few names — in the sphere of experimental audiovisual production, such reference has often acquired a metaphorical, as well as factual, value: spinning, warping, weaving become mental, as well as manual, methodologies, postures for a meticulous, careful, solitary work approach. It is not unusual, in fact, to find in literature such industry concepts as ‘weaving memory,’ ‘weaving movement,’ or ‘warping film.’
Kayako Oki
The filmic production of Kayako Oki, a Japanese artist with a degree in Fine Arts from Tohoku University’s textile arts course, is exemplary in the application of some of these craft practices to the realm of film: her key concepts are in fact the spinning of film and weaving of light. Shot in Super8 since 2011, her Textilm — a word she invented to allude to the fusion of weaving and film — are films as precious as the fine fabrics in which the handling of light, the materiality of the film itself, the management of color, and the development process become the raw materials of creation as found in the short films Fingerprint or Spinning Light (2012), Shades of Safflower (2015), and Träumerei (2019).
Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, and Norman McLaren
The techniques of film coloring, direct object exposure, and scratching, recall the memories of experimental filmmakers, such as Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, and Norman McLaren. Despite the similarities, a feminine way of making and thinking emerges in Kayako Oki’s films — a kindness of ancient origin that she renews in her aptitude for creating images, for imagining worlds, and then caring for them with maternal grace.
If the relationship between weaving and experimental cinema has been explored throughout various eras by authors all over the world, less frequent, but no less fascinating, are the experiences in which it is sculpture that is linked to the universe of images.
The work of Samuel Yal
Among them, I think of the work of Samuel Yal (1982), a French sculptor and filmmaker that trained at École Nationale des Art Appliqués et de l’Image (ENAAI) and and later specialized in the second year of his Masters in Sculpture and Art Sciences at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. For several years, Yal has created sculptures and installations only using mixed techniques (ceramics and porcelain as the base material, to which he adds gold, textiles, glass etc.), forging bodies and faces in particular through the deconstruction and surreal interpretation of forms, amidst explosions of dripping gold, grafts, engravings, and fragmentation. The bodies in Yal’s work suffer the world, retain its traces and, at the same time, go on to occupy space through installations in which the artist enhances the suspension of matter, the lightness of the fragment.
Samuel Yal’s Nœvus (2016)
Nœvus (2016), Yal’s first experimental animation short film, is the result of combining his sculptural skills with the one-step shooting technique. The protagonist of the Super8 short film is porcelain, shown by the artist not as a solid and unalterable material, but as a metamorphic substance — fragile but potentially recreatable.
Similarly, the feeling of coldness typically associated with the lucidity of the material is, in the context of the animation, reminiscent of the silkiness of female skin. In Nœvus, Yal transforms white sea foam of porcelain into the bodies and faces of women that are shattered and recomposed, scattered but resistant multiply, becoming unrecognizable, plural and uncanny.
when manual tradition and love of matter encounter the dynamic audiovisual
It is with thanks to animation, that the work of the craftsman-sculptor transcends the staticity and fixedness of the texture of the molded object, going on to acquire new evolutionary perspectives — not only regarding the sense of the regeneration of porcelain, but also with regards to a somewhat vital redemption that Yal’s sculptural works seem to acquire in the dynamic dimension of film.
At a time when we would be inclined to think of the audiovisual world as the highest expression of high-tech digital technology, the production experiences of Kayako Oki and Samuel Yal evidence, on the contrary, an originality, warmth, and strength that originates precisely from the integration between the low-tech of craft practices and current audiovisual research.
These are virtuous dialogues in which manual tradition and love of matter are dissolved and evolve in the encounter with dynamic audiovisual imagery in works that not only show how impossible it is to define the arts and languages today, but where preciousness lies in the encounter between the past and the contemporary; between preservation, evolution and innovation.
Samuel Yal
Born in 1982, he lives and works in Saint-Cloud, France. Yal is a French sculptor. Porcelain is his favorite material. His work focuses on the tension of the body and face in their relationship to the surrounding space. His sculptures, often suspended, place attention on the presence and absence of the individual, how one projects oneself into the world and, conversely, how one is shaped by it. Samuel Yal studied at ENAAI, Chambéry, France and the Sorbonne.
Kayako Oki
Born in Fukuoka in 1987. Kayako Oki graduated from the Department of Fine Arts in Tohoku University of Art and Design. She started filmmaking during her study in the university and has continued to work with a series of textilm projects focusing on similarities between film and textile. One of the series Spinning Light (2012) has been widely shown in international festivals.
