Real Body/
Dream Body
Sunday 6th October
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
10:00 - 11:15 | 60min plus Q&A
International short films
The mirror neurons activate the motor areas in our brains when we watch someone perform an action, as if we were doing the same. As embodied spectators, incarnate beings, what do we sense when we watch other bodies on screen? These films are connected by movement, sensorial embodiment, both strength and fragility of bodies. How do we connect with the world and each other through our physical form?
Films by:
Lili Süper | Charlie Jimenez | Gabi Rudin | Rhiana Bonterre | Samuel Karow | Rebecca Barten
PRESERVATION OF A MUSE
Lili Süper | 18min
Preservation of a Muse is an 18-minute recording of a computer desktop. Like a transcendental god figure, the artist speaks on a webcam from a forest of windows. She talks about her older friend Wolfgang. Exactly two years ago, she wanted to scan his body in a studio in order to build a large sculpture of him for an exhibition. But on that day, Wolfgang suddenly tells her about his cancer diagnosis. In the face of illness, the plan changes. As if searching, Lili now moves his 3D image through various virtual spaces, as if looking for an image that does justice to him and the history of his body. In interviews, Wolfgang talks about his relationship to his body in the face of illness, about eternity and holding on. Thus, the visual collage forms an investigation: how modernity diagnoses bodies with images and manifests itself through regimes of gaze.

Transmutation
Charlie Jimenez | 10min
A story of creation: a blind god creates their eyes at the moment of a woman's birth. The two undergo several transformations before transmutating into a chimera.

All of this must be paid for
Gabi Rudin | 12min
The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers.

A Story, An Invocation, An Opening
Rhiana Bonterre | 9min
This short experimental-documentary work was devised from somatic intuitive dance workshops with a group of global majority folks, and brings together family archive footage of Trinidad Carnival, and sonic rhythms from the region to ignite a ghostly presence representative of personal and collective anxieties and transgenerational trauma. It conjures a sensorial ritual of sound and movement, through the stories our bodies hold and the spectres they manifest.

The Dream Portal
Samuel Karow | 4min
The Dream Portal is an experimental self-portrait exploring fetishism, body image, and identity through raw analog imagery. Using vintage technology and no digital effects, the filmmaker appears as masked human–machine hybrids within dreamlike scenes where shame, desire, and fantasy collapse into an unsettling yet intimate portrait.

Fragments of a Journal in Hell
Rebecca Barten | 8min
A narrated found footage collage film bringing together fragments of writing by the French Surrealist poet, essayist and philosopher, Antonin Artaud. Fragments of a Journal in Hell both looks at and exemplifies a self under siege, undergoing agonizing psycho-physical states. At the same time, the film celebrates a improbably alive artistic practice struggling to still create personal metaphors during a wartime of the self and the world.
