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“A_biography” Alexander Schellow, France-Germany, 2017

Drawn and animated from memory 2013-2015

How can a person suffering from Alzheimer’s still tell their own life?

In the common room of an Alzheimer’s clinic, music from the radio mixes with the low volume clatter of plates, the steps, the door movements or the quiet click of a light switch. The acoustic landscape triggers the dancing of an old lady in a wheelchair. She “remembers”.

“A_biography” recollects through drawn animation, point by point, the emergence of a memory exactly where it seems lost – remembering: the possibility of being at a “point of view”. This process takes place in a gliding state of constant transformation on the surface of a now closed body of memory.

“A_biography” is not a fictional biography. A_biography realizes a biography as fiction.

Director Statement

For years I visited HER in the clinic where she was staying. I became some kind of a ‘proximate other’ to her, and she to me.

The woman suffered from Alzheimer’s for many years. She had lost her capacity to remember, or: her ability to be in (only) one other place seen from a ‘standpoint’, or: to name an object and thereby say precisely ‘I’ through this relation to the object. Vis-à-vis ‘her-self’, the woman is located in a sliding state of constant transformation on the outer surface of a body of memory now and forever closed; a state analogous to that which prevents her from identifying ‘something’ or someone. Not being able to adress me as ‘you’, for example, at the other end of the room. And turned around again: if it was still possible, to say ‘me’ to herself, that wouldn’t refer to a state of subject anymore? ‘me’, here might be the inexistent overlapping point of oscillating processes of (non-)consciousness. Then, who was that “you” who sat across from her all these years?

Bio

Alexander Schellow’s research originates in an interest for methods of memory (re)construction, which he developed and pursued in daily drawing and animation practice. The hybrid processes materialize into projects that have been shown widely internationally, most recently at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In addition, collaborations in recent years have focused in particular on the creation of specific archives (e.g. Colonial Family Films, Belgium) or on interfaces of human/digital (re)cognition, especially in the field of current deep learning developments.

His pedagogical practice has taken him to universities, among others, in London, Paris, Tirana, Singapore, Mexico City and Brussels, where he founded AnimLAB and since 2013 holds a professorship in animation, heading an MA of more than human practices at the erg – école de recherche graphique.

Editing Jean-Laurent Csinidis

Sound design Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Nans Mengeard

Sound mix Nans Mengeard

Mixing studio Studio Lemon (Pierre Armand, Fred Bielle)

Produced by Jean-Laurent Csinidis

Postproduction coordinator Nora Bertone, Jerome Nunes

Accountancy MC2 / Marielle Salsa, Christophe Marlin (Spectacle Assistance Anissa Berali)

Production Films de Force Majeure, index.film

In coproduction with Studio Lemon

Supported by Goethe Institute Marseille

In cooperation with Catalogue du Sensible

Thanks to Tsveta Dobreva (Goethe Institute Marseille), Jean-Marc Montera (GNEM), Laura de la Torre

 

Distributors:

Films de Force Majeure (France)

indexfilmDistributor (Germany)

https://www.films-de-force-majeure.com/project/a-biography/ 

pebbles

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.


By pebbles

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.