AVAILABLE FOR FREE STREAMING MARCH 30 - APRIL 13, 2023

Click here to learn how to watch a FREE program on VUCAVU

 


FRAGMENTS: LA CÔTE

Placements + Ruptures: The Healing Quest

In-person + live-streamed cinematic event by Collectif HAT @ PIX FILM COLLECTIVE
Saturday, April 8, 2023 at 8 PM (ET) (7 PM CT/ 9 PM AT / 5 PM PT)
PIX FILM STUDIO, 1411 Dufferin Street, Unit C, Toronto, Ontario.

Over the last year, Alexandra Gelis and Madi Piler have been remotely mentoring and meeting with the three Moncton-based artists who make up Collectif HAT, namely Hyacinthe Raimbault, Angie Richard and Tracey Richard. During the first week of April 2023, HAT are traveling to Toronto to conduct a 1 week residency at PIX Film Studio where they will work directly with Gelis and Piller and complete a new media artwork they've developed during their mentorship.

To celebrate the closing of our Placements + Ruptures programming series, VUCAVU is thrilled to present FRAGMENTS: LA CÔTE; a hybrid cinematic performance by Collectif HAT resulting from this mentorship that is being presented in partnership with PIX Film. 

Bouquet of flowers with flowers in the centre are on fire. Colour image in a dark environment.

VUCAVU Presents:

PLACEMENTS + RUPTURES:
THE HEALING QUEST

Curated by Alexandra Gelis and Madi Piller
 


Still image at left from "Into the Impossible", Collectif HAT, 2018, 00h 06m 16s, Image courtesy of the artists

A series of experimental films, a landscape of landscapes, in which the living sing, ghosts whisper, there are love letters to pain, where a house explodes in abstractions, and the revisiting of childhood places offers together a universe that collapses onto itself.

"Placements + Ruptures: The Healing Quest" offers five short films in which the filmmakers’ poetics and immense generosity build solid emotional worlds illustrating their quest for healing. This program also reflects on the curators' own processes of healing their pain and loss. A path walked or to be walked by all. It is an encounter with artists who weave memories within the medium's materiality and leaves us with intimate and supportive thoughts.

Placements + Ruptures: The Healing Quest

Essay by Alexandra Gelis and Madi Piller


A series of experimental films, a landscape of landscapes, in which the living sing, ghosts whisper, there are love letters to pain, where a house explodes in abstractions, and the revisiting of childhood places offers together a universe that collapses onto itself. "Placements + Ruptures: The Healing Quest" offers five short films in which the filmmakers’ poetics and immense generosity build solid emotional worlds illustrating their quest for healing. 

In close contact with plants, we constantly get exposed to unpredictable becomings. Plants carry memories and can help us to predict or transform those memories into the potential capacities of imagining futurities. They are allies and activators in remembering both personal and collective stories. The twin sisters, Angie and Tracey Richard from Collectif HAT, open up thise program with their video Into the impossible (2018), an emotional portrayal of grief using their late grandfather's funeral flower arrangements. The making of a short film becomes medicine for healing existential wounds, born when the spirit starts to dissolve. 

Louise Bourque's film L’éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart starts with a voiceover speaking directly to the viewer. The voiceover recounts the filmmaker's dreams taken from an audio dream journal. As described in the movie's narration, the deterioration begins with phrases such as "all the homes are crumbling."  A explodes and burns the archetype of the family home, a house as a metaphor for the self. The abstract 35mm film has a surreal feel in which the emulsion becomes a way of moving past the surface of the image and it becomes a meditation on the inevitable fear of death, the longing for memory and loss.
 

...making of a short film becomes medicine for healing existential wounds, born when the spirit starts to dissolve. 

Still image from "L’éclat du mal / The Bleeding Heart of It", Louise Bourque, 2005, 00h 08m 08s, CFMDC

Mike Rollo’s documentation of ghost towns on the prairies creates an emotional film with panoramic shots of run-down farmhouses in faraway places, tracking shots of dusty roads, black-and-white family portrait photographs tacked on the walls of the abandoned structures. Ghost and Gravel Roads (2018) frame emptiness and absence while serving as a metaphor for displacement and the loss of power when we face death.

At this point, it is would be interesting to mention Allison Stevens work, which also works the idea of film as a healing device and as a narrative medium to understand experiences of grief of broken hearts. Letters to Heal a Broken Heart (2022) longing for life and healing brings us closer to the physical self. Deleting and cutting photos evolve into the ritual of creating 29 letters to reclaim the body's comeback. 
 

... frame emptiness and absence while serving as a metaphor for displacement and the loss of power when we face death.

Still image from "Ghost and Gravel Roads", Mike Rollo, 2008, 5:00, CFMDC

 

Going back home through an introspective journey is the poetic task of the filmmaker looking for her roots. In Reminiscences (2012), Petunia Alves reconstructs her childhood loss in her old home. The camera travels through places previously inhabited and now unknown; the abstraction of sound and flashes of familiar situations illuminates her exploration of landscapes while trying to find those places in her memory. The town's musical band serves as a guide taking us through daily scenes of women cleaning garlic, organizing oranges to sell, children on the swings under the mango tree, and the salty sea preserving it all with its rhythmic waves "From now on I am the one who holds vigil".

To conclude, Placements + Ruptures: The Healing Quest also reflects the two curators' healing of their pain and loss. A path walked or to be walked by all. It is an encounter with artists who weave memories within the medium's materiality and leave us with intimate and supportive thoughts. 


- Co-written by Alexandra Gelis + Madi Piller

 

... the abstraction of sound and flashes of familiar situations illuminates her exploration of landscapes while trying to find those places in her memory.

ABOUT COLLECTIF HAT


COLLECTIF HAT’s work originates from various subjects, and uses different media such as light, video, and sound, to create multimedia installations and experimental short films. In their cinematographic exploration and their artistic work, the artists never confine themselves to a specific genre. Using various techniques like time-lapse, animation, projection mapping, and field recording manipulation, their work is at the crossroads of digital and analogue worlds.

HAT is formed by three artists (Hyacinthe Raimbault, Angie Richard, Tracey Richard) with different backgrounds who share their skills to create art installations, experimental films, and VJ projections for live concerts. Since 2018, their work has been showcased at several festivals throughout the Maritimes (RE:FLUX, Inspire, Messtival, Third Shift, Area 506, Lumière, Nocturne) as well as nationally from coast to coast (Dawson City, Vancouver, Montréal...) and internationally in Louisiana and Paris.
>> www.collectifhat.ca/
 

ABOUT THE CURATORS



ALEXANDRA GELIS

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan artist, educator and researcher living between Canada, Panama and Colombia. Her practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary including film, photography, drawing, and media installation with custom-built interactive electronics and sound. Her projects incorporate personal field research as a tool to investigate the ecologies of various landscapes by examining the traces left by various socio-political interventions. From her plant-based research-creation: she explores, documents and re-creates ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and between plants and their multi-species interrelationships.  The idea of plants as political allies and as actors is central to her concept of "Migrated Plants". 

Gelis has exhibited in film festivals and exhibitions internationally in the Americas, Europe and Africa. The Walker Art Center; Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Bienal del Sur; Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur; Images Festival Toronto; ArtworxTO. Toronto; Oboro, Montreal; Museum of London (CA); YYZ Gallery; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Montevideo;  Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires; LABOCINE; Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film; Alucine latin media festival; Vancouver Latin Film Festival; Dresdner schmalfilmtage; Pleasure Dome; Museo la Tertulia; Espacios Revelados / Changing Places; The Paseo Project New Mexico; and others.
She has given talks at Kassel and Documenta Institute, Germany; Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; University of Zurich; and many arts and food sovereignty conferences.

Alexandra has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. She has curated several shows across Canada and South America the last few years.
>> https://alexandragelis.com/ 
>> ON VUCAVU

MADI PILLER

Madi Piller is a filmmaker, animator, and independent curator currently living and working in Toronto, Canada. Born in Lima, Peru, she began shooting Super 8 while working as the director of production at the J. Walter Tompson ad agency in Colombia. When she moved to Canada in 1999, she became involved in the grassroots, not for profit artist-run centre scene. She has worked as a volunteer, over a decade, tirelessly creating programming, promoting the production, distribution, and exhibition of independent animated work. For that she received the Ontario Citizenship Volunteer award in 2015. She is a founding member and lead Artistic Director at PIX FILM Collective, a community advocate, helping to organize and inspire others to share conversations old and new multimedia innovations for which she created the PIX FILM in 2015 the Studio Immersion Program, supporting more than 30 artists to date. Madi has also a supportive role in the production of an animated LGTBQ docu- web-series How to Get a Girl Pregnant.

Her Curatorial projects include: Eleven in Motion: Abstract Expressions in Animation (2009), Hello Amiga (2012), OP ART Re-Imaged: Imaginable Spaces (2014), and The Frame is the Keyframe: Frame Anomalies (2016). From A to Z in Vienna (2018), My Home Here in Peru (2019),  View/Regard – PIX FILM Window screening and Augmented Reality Postcards (2020), Augmented Reality MOVEMENT: Toronto<>Vienna (2021). Art et Imaginaire Toronto<> Vienne (2022), Site Unseen: Augmented Reality by Latinx Artists (2022).
>> https://www.madipiller.com/
>> https://www.pixfilm.ca/
>> ON VUCAVU


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



This programming series is presented by VUCAVU.


 

VUCAVU acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.



VUCAVU acknowledges the following organizations for their partnership and support.