Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Created based on research conducted during a 2018 residency at LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto), SUMMER HEAT AN EARLY FROST combines the narrative structures of film, documentation, photography, cinematographic staging, and interview into a collage on the organizational principles of our perception. Similar to a stream of consciousness formed of constantly expanding recordings that proceed as the common denominator between a partially sensory, partially mechanically narrative voice and a screen text that fluctuates in intervals between narration, commentary, and subtitle, the image flow comprises a number of visual resources: arranged rhythmically behind an archival setup of vintage pornographic magazines from the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection, the marked text passages on film theory are taken from a collection of essays by Russian formalists. A multi-layered and narrative complement is present in the form of excerpts from “An Early Frost” (1985)—the first mainstream TV feature film to address the emerging public, social, and political crisis surrounding the spread of HIV/AIDS as part of the everyday life of a US family. Quietly and with an almost static austerity, set pieces from early silent films of the 1920s such as those from Jean Epstein and Dziga Vertov are superimposed across from sexually fetishized sequences of self-produced montages from tooth and mouth recordings, only to be expanded upon in the form of a new cut expounding on the pornographic industry’s digital infrastructure. Massed like a cluster of findings from a multimedia, multi-thematic search for the internal logics of filmic and documentary mechanisms of production and affect—whose focus potentially also stretches to include the representation and repression of queer desire, longing, and craving—the montage opens up a different access to images and their language; a language whose essence is concealed in the multiplicity of the information gathered and which, transferred via data-mining technology into the artistic process of the film, facilitates the recognition of patterns of regularity and of hidden interrelations.

Benjamin Ramirez Perez, is visual artist working primarily with film, video and installation based in Cologne, Germany. He was a participant at De Ateliers Amsterdam from 2016-2018 and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 2009–2015 with Julia Scher, Phil Collins and Matthias Mueller. His works have been screened at IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno, Edinburgh and Toronto International Film Festival, as well as Julia Stoschek Collection Du?sseldorf, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Visions du Réel Nyon among others. He had group and solo exhibitions at Artothek Cologne, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, de Ateliers Amsterdam, Gallery Markus Luettgen Duesseldorf, and more. In 2015 he was awarded the Chargesheimer Scholarship for Media Art by the City of Cologne and in 2013 he received the Prize of the German Association for Film Journalists.