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film and video art
Duration: 00:04:55
Accumulate is an “anthroposcenic” film, one that demonstrates the impacts of human industrialization on the landscape in picturesque style. High fashion prevails in the aestheticization of the derelict through baroque refuse couture.
DIRECTOR, ARTIST : Lisa Birke
CONTACTS / LINKS : http://lisabirke.com @birke.lisa Lisa Birke (facebook) Artist Talk at Struts Gallery: Virtual Artist Talk: Lisa Birke – TimeShare 2021 Mentor The Experimental Film Podcast: Season 3 Episode 15 – Interdisciplinary Artist Lisa Birke Unlocking Creativity: The Power of Striving for Failure | Lisa Birke | TEDxUniversityofSaskatchewan
The performance-for-video and ancillary documentation was filmed in a partially abandoned industrial site in Barreiro, Portugal, that had manufactured, amongst other things, paint, textiles, and shoe molds or “lasts”. The site is now home to a recycling facility that separates valuable materials such as copper from the plastic encasings of electrical wires. Textural impressions and discarded materials accessorize the ever-growing outfit in a split screen format. The almost post-apocalyptic setting is littered with concrete ruins, fabric remnants, hardened resin barrels, glass, asbestos, and other toxic materials that the artist walks in a seemingly endless runway.
The work is a rumination on fast fashion, the codes underlying the fashion machine, and the stain that manufacturing leaves on our environment. A cacophony of machine and diegetic sound creates an unnerving soundtrack that builds in energy only to reverberate into emptiness.
The work asks the viewer to consider the implications of progress at all costs and the connections between over-consumption and the keeping up of appearances in an image obsessed culture.
Director’s statement
I work in the collision of video art, 360 video, mixed media installation, and augmented reality from the flat but sensorially mountainous Treaty Six Territory. I try to break the confines of the screen’s frame to free the stories trapped therein. I am fascinated by how notions of the feminine have been constructed through historical storytelling and image making that feed our insatiable popular culture. My work teases out how notions of identity are entangled in narrative tropes, the keeping up of appearances, and our need for validation in a bid to unsuccessfully ward off existential dread in a system of control and commerce.
Bio
Birke’s award-winning video work has seen more than 100 screenings and installations at film festivals, media centers and in galleries and museums internationally, including Vancouver International Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, International Short Film Week Regensburg, Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival of Expanded Media, Cambridge Art Galleries, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, PAVED Arts, and the Remai Modern along with many others. She has received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts for her community-engaged research and independent projects. Birke is Associate Professor of Digital and Extended Media at the University of Saskatchewan.
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Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved. Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.