The work was available on our platform only for the period of the screening.
“Acta Nocturna” (00:12:34) by Pako Quijada, Germany, 2021
“Currently in its Beta phase, the Acta Nocturna program is a 2 week immersive experience for those having trouble with their sleep. By creating nightly rituals, maximum efficiency of sleep will be achieved.”
Serving as a parodic promotional video, the project brings attention to the overwhelming nature of today’s targeted marketing practices. Combining choreographed movement and a surreal tone, it ultimately highlights the demand placed on customers and the often ill-defined line separating them from becoming the product.
Director Statement
By thematising the absurdity of marketing, preying on the tiredness and desperation of the chronically sleep-deprived viewer, Acta Nocturna takes on my personal experience with insomnia with humour. I use influences from a multitude of sources to portray how something as banal as sleeping is being marketed as an experience, with corporations presenting it as something in need of constant fine-tuning and optimisation. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, the viewer-turned-consumer is conditioned by the repetition of messages, being asked more and more by the service provider, to the point where they end up becoming the product.
Bio
Pako Quijada is a multidisciplinary artist, predominantly working with photography and film. They studied Photography and Filmmaking in San Sebastián, Spain.
Their work places itself at the centre of the psychological gravitas of emotions and the construction of memory. With cinema as a constant referent, their work mixes magic and the surreal with the lived experience, eventually bringing existential questions to the forefront. Analytical in its approach, but visceral in its result, their artistic output places inherently political and highly personal topics into a universal arena.
They are currently living and working in Berlin, Germany.
Director, writer: Pako Quijada
Producers: Pako Quijada, Kristian Askelund
Cast: Anna Dushime, Paula Henningsen, Hana Sakamoto, Pako Quijada
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.
