T H E  U N S E E N  F E S T I V A L  2018

City Symphonies

Join us on Monday, September 3, 7:30pm for night 3 of the Unseen Festival. We will screen work by Nacho Recio, Ivenlina Ivanova, Jiayi Chen (who will be in person), Ralph Klewitz, Rob Munday, Dan Browne, Bill Brown, and Victor Brim. Preceded by a reading by Carolina Ebeid, Jeffrey Pethybridge, and Patrick Pethybridge.

Autorretrato (Self Portrait) – Nacho Recio – Spain – 2016 – 4 min

Autorretrato (Self Portrait) is presented as an awakening into the unknown, as an attempt to reach new emotional and sensory levels.

Nacho Recio is a telecommunications engineer (sound and image) and multidisciplinary artist. After directing a documentary in Hollywood about John Frusciante’s life (ex Red Hot Chili Peppers) he began to work making videos for music bands like Chambao (‘lo mejor pa ti?’, 2013). He has also directed Tv series like Fausto (2011) in super 16mm or Films like N/949 (2013). His Videoart has been in museums like CAC Ma?laga or ERARTA Saint Petersburg  ‘morphoge?nesis’,2014), winning prices in International Experimental Cinema Festivals like PROTESTA 2016 (?preferentes?, 2016, FIRST PRIZE) or BIDEODROMO 2015(‘broken mirrors’, 2014, SECOND PRIZE) or in Important and independent Cinema Festivals like ESMoA VIDEOART Film Fest California 17, Film Sozialak CINE INVISIBLEBilbao 17, URBAN Film Fest Tehran 17, Miami New Media Festival 17, AIAPI Videoart in Loop UNESCO Italia 17, THIRD CULTURE Film Fest Hong Kong 16, EXILE Film Festival Malmo? 2016, Experimental Superstars Serbia 16, Festival de Cine de Ma?laga15, etc.

Silent London – Ivelina Ivanova  – Bulgaria/United Kingdom – 2017 – 3 min

A celebration of community’s instinctual need for unity through dance. Inside the club, the borders of reality become blurry to open up truths outside of representation. Outside of the club stretches out a vast cityscape of urban mundanity.

Ivelina Ivanova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria to a Russian-Bulgarian family. She grew up in Sofia where she first started developing her interest in art, starting with drawing, painting and illustrating until she moved to London in 2014 to study animation. After graduating from the University of Westminster, she moves back to Sofia. Coming from a mixed family and living in several countries at once has influenced Ivelina’s films, which are often inspired by urban spaces and their sociological and psychological impact. Her works are mixed-media, combining a variety of techniques including stop motion, digital collage and watercolour rotoscoping. Her aim for artistic development is to build up on the skill of melting the border between digital and analogue aesthetics to achieve alternative modes of representation.

The Words are Not What You Meant – Jiayi Chen – USA – 2017 – 13 min

The Words Are Not What You Meant is a stranger’s quest in Chicago Chinatown, for a sense of being in a politically uncertain time. It derives from experiences of translation and transportation, negotiations with foreignness and intimacy, and attempts to physically and emotionally inhabit a place. The voiceover is an improvised verbal translation of found text and the subtitles are partially auto translated via Google Translate.

Jiayi Chen was born in Chongqing, China, and is currently based in Chicago, IL. She works in hand-processed film, video and installation. She is interested in language, instructions and correspondence; and speaks with an accent.

WZ557_Mont1 – Ralph Klewitz – Australia – 2018 – 2 min

Fading in from black, the video sequence shows three Melbournian playground horses rocking without human intervention. After a while, the scene fades again to black. The soundtrack is a composed melody comprising of overlaid, paraverbal and distorted computer voices that vary and repeat a musical theme.

Ralph Klewitz: “I was born in 1965, grew up in Switzerland and studied visual communication design as well as fine arts. In 2011 I graduated with a Master of Arts in Contemporary Arts Practice from the Bern University of the Arts and since 2014 I am a doctoral candidate to study towards the Doctor of Arts Degree at Aalto University, Department of Art, in Helsinki. The topics of my artistic practice and research in fine arts raise cultural, ethical and political questions and I negotiated those in various geographical contexts with meaningful and meaningless; intangible and tangible contents.” – RK http://ralphklewitz.blogspot.co.uk/

Rome in Fragments – Rob Munday – Italy/UK – 2017 – 3 min

Rome in Fragments combines a musical tribute to Merce Cunningham from acclaimed composer Stephen Montague with images from a discarded 1960s Italian book on Rome. It is made up entirely from minute details taken from photos within this book. Looked at closely we find the hidden figures within these pictures and reveal the texture from the dot screen printing.

Rob Munday is a filmmaker from London interested in patterns and the oddness of the everyday. Working in both live-action and animation his subjects range from musical happenings to curious lemons. His animation Teddy Goldblatt screened at South By Southwest and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Rob’s other films have shown worldwide including the BFI London Film Festival, Flatpack Film Festival, Stuttgart Trickfilm Festival and the London Short Film Festival.

Lines of Force – Dan Browne – Canada – 2018 – 2 min

E=mc^2 means that all matter is condensed energy. In its purest form, energy is light. Perhaps matter cannot go faster than light because all matter consists of light.

Dan Browne (b. 1982) is a filmmaker, photographer and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns and nature through dense and kinetic forms. His films and videos have been presented at over one hundred festivals and venues internationally, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Diagonal Film Archive, Centre Georges Pompidou, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival and Early Monthly Segments. His multimedia work memento mori (2012) received the Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, First Prize at Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Deluxe Cinematic Award at Images Festival. Most recently, Poem (2015) was released on Graphical Recording’s Variations, and received the Trinity Square Video Award at Images. Dan’s media practices also encompass live performances in collaboration with musicians, and video installations that have received public commissions in Toronto and Vancouver.

XCTRY – Bill Brown – USA – 2018 – 7 min

A pocket-sized travelogue about leaving one hometown and looking for the next one. Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.

Bill Brown is a media artist interested in ways landscape is interpreted, appropriated, and reconfigured according to human desires, memories, and dreams. His research interests include haunted houses, UFO’s, memorial architecture, and outsider archaeology. He lives in North Carolina and teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Monoscape – Viktor Brim – Germany – 2017 – 17 min

Equipment and loading mechanisms of a port area wander in constant motion rhythmically and purposefully along the quay. ISO containers in different colours are lifted and re-placed elsewhere, in between: moments of motionlessness and stagnation. Defeated by the machines in terms of size, some dock workers wearing bright orange safety jackets can be spotted in the middle of the loading and container bridges. During the approaching night, the processes around the port area appear in a different light, only shadows and silhouettes of the continuous machine processes remain. Monoscape shows fragments, shapes and movements of an industrial cycle. Through the calm and documentary images, the machinery processes gain a repetitive and ubiquitous dimension. Removed from their purpose-determined context, they seem like anonymous idle objects in an engineered landscape.

Viktor Brim is a filmmaker and media artist, mainly concerned with the medium film. His works are equally infused with strategies and aesthetics of the fictional and the documentary. They focus on glances, gestures and actions in regard to urban and transitory spaces. In Viktor Brim’s films, space appears as a metaphor-creating process due to its liminal status between subject and object.

Readers

Carolina Ebeid is the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press). She is a student in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver. She has won fellowships from CantoMundo, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the NEA. Recent work appears in Poetry, PEN America, jubilat and American Poetry Review. She helps edit poetry at The Rumpus.

Jeffrey Pethybridge is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013).  His work appears widely in journals such as Chicago Review, Volt, Poor Claudia, The Iowa Review, LIT, New American Writing and others. He teaches  in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is the Managing Director of the Summer Writing Program. He is also the North American Editor for Likestarlings, a web-archive of collaborative poetry and poetics. He lives in Denver with the poet Carolina Ebeid and their son Patrick; together the edit Visible Binary. He’s currently at work on a documentary project centered on the recently released torture memos entitled “Force Drift, an Essay in the Epic.” He grew up in Virginia.

Patrick Pethybridge is a teenage poet. He serves as the editor of Visible Binary, an online zine of experimental poetry, short text, media, and other genres. He enjoys geography, visualizing alternate worlds, and translating Spanish language poets such as Raquel Salas Rivera and César Vallejo. He resides with his parents in Denver, CO, where he pursues eighth grade at Dora Moore School.