About Kinotektur

Welcome to the Kinotektur blog, a showcase for the ongoing research of my PhD dissertation at Oslo School of Architecture and Design:

The PhD project Places of Memory and Mnemonics – built environment and filmic space as frameworks for recollection pursues an interest in the relations between physical environment and memory in society and culture. It focuses on how we remember physical environments, how we utilise the environments to organise, retrieve, and disseminate memories, and how we communicate these matters. Against the background of this interest the project will study the potential to make films with digital video technology to provide with a discursive tool to problematise cases and phenomena characterised by the relations between our recollection and the physical environments.

Mattias Ekman AA Dipl

Contact: mattias.ekman[at]aho.no

Reading the Memories of Space

Last week I visited the ADGD conference in Nottingham with the title: The Multiple Faces of Identity in the Designed Environment. I presented this paper on how the spaces of the National Gallery in Oslo are appropriated for personal and cultural memories to act as arguments for not moving the exhibition out of the nineteenth century building.

Mnemonics as Complementary Space

In august I visited the ISEA conference in Belfast and Coleraine to present this paper outlining a strategy for film/video work within the phd-project. It talks about autobiographical memory in relation to spaces of conflicts and looks at sequences of Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique are looked at to speculate on possible editing techniques.

I recommend to look at the Prison’s Memory Archive project presented at the conference!

Come and See!

Elem Klimovs film from 1985 tries to convey the horror of the German invasion of Belarus in WW II. We follow a young boy who wants to join the partisans in their struggle, and witness how he looses his innocence when becoming witness to the systematic burning down of a village and its inhabitants by the Nazi army. A deeply moving and disturbing film, it tells us something of the spatiality of such a conflict. The geographical terrain of a certain group of people, with its landscape, buildings and social relations, is the target of the enemy. Home, or Heimat, its subjects and its object are to be exterminated. A stunning footage and a soundtrack of masterly quality. It is unethical in this context to talk about beauty, instead I’d like to praise its precision of expression.

Many sequences of the film are to be found on YouTube, one of them you can see as a link on the right side of this page!

A War Nightmare – The Last of England

Jarman’s film The Last of England from 1987 is a cinematic poem. Imagery of frustrated young men in abandoned industrial landscapes, naked and theatrical dancing, and images from families with kids playing in green gardens mix with clearly staged images of men with rifles, watching over and executing people in ruined urban landscapes. Music, noise or the sounds of screaming people, shots, explosions or fire provide with a soundtrack of horror, of a nightmare.

A narrator holds a monologue in the first minutes of the film. The spoken text does not explain the images. Not the other way around either, the images do not clarify the words. They just influence each other to produce the apocalyptic and sad meditation on society. Jarman uses images of today to picture something of the future, or of his dreams. The result lies clearly in the montage of images and sounds. One image watched separately would barely cause the same feeling of discomfort. I wonder if sound effects are lees invasive on the mind and my memories than the photograph or the moving image? The images tend to force away other memories and claim they truth, the sound does not to the same extent.

The film does not offer a framing narrative to understand the people we see in the ruined cityscapes. In La Jetée by Chris Marker (1962), a much similar film in many ways, the narrating voice binds together the various images into a story we can follow – even if the images are disparate. In The Last of England we don’t know if the images of the children or of the girl have anything to do with the men moving around in the rubble, or the scenes with the executions. They can well be oppositions in their image character, in the visual concepts they convey.

Is the film a poem? Is it fiction or a personal meditation? Or is it simply a prophecy or a nightmare come true of what would happen just a few years later in cities like Sarajevo, Mostar, or Vukovar? A wordless prohecy, nonetheless related to war contemplations such as Wargame by Peter Watkins (1965) or Je vous salue Sarajevo by Jean-Luc Godard (1993). The repetition and the sometimes surreal image montage suggest a mightmare-like experience. The fragmentary commentary and the non-synchronised sound underlines this.

Spatiality extended in time: El Cant dels Ocells

I had high expectations, having read about the film El Cant dels Ocells (Birdsong) by Spanish Albert Serra in the Nordic edition of Le monde diplomatique already last spring. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see it at Oslo International Film Festival.

The film is an almost abstract montage of beautifully filmed natural landscapes of mountains, arid land, caves, coastal and snow landscapes. Three tragicomic figures, the three kings, search for the new born child. It is easy so sympathise with the elderly men in their well worn crowns, looking after each other, while struggling forward in slow tempo. So human.

The film offers a different time space. Long shots, no hurry. We have time to wander with our eyes around in the landscapes. Barely audible sounds, sometimes no sound at all. Very little dialogue. The film seems to refuse the acceleration of time of our age. It enters into a filmic landscape of film-makers such as Tarkovsky and Sokurov. There is an excellent scene of the three walking in the desert eventually moving out of the image at the horizon, only to appear again after half a minute or so of empty landscape. I wonder how much the film offers a spatiality of itself, composed with the framed, filmed landscapes, inhabited with fictional character, turned into black and white graphics? Or if this assembly method actually succeeds in communicating to us some kind of inherent beauty of the landscapes depicted?

Speed is political. To do things slowly today can appear provocative. Half of the audience had left the film before it had finished – and this in a film festival where people could be expected to be more used to non-commercial films than elsewhere. El Cant dels Ocells is a beautiful contribution to the meditation on time, space and humanity.

“The Cult of Age in Mass-Society: Alois Riegl’s Theory of Conservation”

In the article by Thordis Arrhenius, she brings forward the notions of intentional and unintentional monuments, as defined by Alois Riegl in an 1903 article. The intentional monuments are “erected for a specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events alive in the minds of future generations” as opposed to the unintentional, which “were not erected with the purpose of commemorating any specific event or person” (Arrhenius, 2004:74). The unintentional monument is widely understood as any artefact that “reveals the passage of a considerable period of time” (ibid:75).

If I relate this to my own interest of how memories depend on having a spatial location, can the intentional monument – a building, a statue or an engraved stone – be considered as a space to attach personal and collective memories to? It offers a replacement space in absence of the place where the commemorated event happened (which would have been the unintentional monument) – it has been destroyed or changed, is too far away or in foreign hands, not possible to reach or see et cetera. Specifically made for the commemoration of the specific event, it takes the task of housing the memories. It offers a spatial location for the act of recollection, a place functioning as a memory trigger but also as a mnemonic device with similar function as the spaces of ars memoria (Yates 1992) in which contents of a speech was memorised through placement of mental images of them in the rooms of a building. A substitute for the space of the real event. While the unintentional monument can only refer to itself as the physicality of the event, the intentional must refer to something else – another place or the same place under different conditions.

Arrhenius, Thordis. (2004). The Cult of Age in Mass-Society: Alois Riegl’s Theory of Conservation. Future anterior: journal of historic preservation history, theory and criticism, 1: 75-81.

Yates, Frances A. (1992). The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico.

Research by design seminar – part III

I reflect upon my own project, which deals with how essayistic video production can become a discourse platform for remembered spaces. It differs from the academic research projects presented in the seminar. They were addressing the design and the design process of physical objects: music instruments, RFID storage devices, architectural projects. My project addresses the design and design process of a mediating, artefact – a video, assembled imagery and sounds. It is not about an object that we can discuss for its physical properties, but it aims itself to be a subjective, if also collective, discourse about questions of space and experience. As such it has more in common with a PhD project like that of Katja Grillner (Ramble, Linger, and Gaze : Dialogues from the Landscape Garden, KTH 2000) suggesting alternative tools for academic and public discourse.

Research by design seminar – part II

There is something with the intuition of combining practical and theoretical aspects in research project. When writing my PhD project description, without any prior knowledge of the discourse on practice-based research, it seemed to me fairly obvious to combine a design process with a theoretical process of research. That was before this autumn’s PhD course and the seminar. Now I understand that for many this is not so obvious. I see there is a need for a methodological justification for combining research with design. As if such a project should at the same time belong to two disparate traditions of acquiring knowledge. Is that really how one ought to see it? Can we instead of seeing it as a polarity between research (theory) and design (practice) consider it as belonging to a separate, third category, not positioned between, but at the side? I suggest to re-term research by design to better being able to define it positively as a unique approach. Not negatively for what it is not, but rather positively for its uniqueness.

Research by design seminar – part I

Last week I attended the Research by Design seminar at Oslo School of Architecture and Design. It was led by Andrew Morrison and speaking were Chris Rust, Michael Weinstock, Michael Hensel, Pattie Bell Hastings, Timo Arnall, Einar Sneve Martinussen, Børre Skodvin, Birger Sevaldsson and Mick Eekhout.

The seminar raised questions about the relation of research to practice and design. For, even if Rust, Hensel and Sevaldsson seemed to agree on that the research projects in question – phd or higher – were primarily research and secondarily practice or design, it appeared to be a strong need to define and justify the project’s position within the scholarly tradition. When is what we do research? The practitioners, Skodvin and Eekhout advocated the singular search-approach to each of their professional design projects, Eekhout out of need because of the different requirements of each assignment, Skodvin out of interest. For his company each project should offer them as designers something to search for an learn.

Night and Fog

A reflection on the 1955 film by Alain Resnais “Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)”. What I found horrifying when I saw the film again after a few years, was spatialising of something which is not graspable. Resnais shows us the spaces of extermination camps, the rooms of the experiences of people. He does not refer to Holocaust as an abstract phenomenon, but to it as a system of spaces, places with logistical challenges. The film manages to create concrete space out of the abstract. It comes close. See excerpts of the film to the right. More facts on the film here