Catalogue > At random

Ella Raidel

A Pile of Ghosts

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 70:0 | Autriche, Chine | 2021

The real estate broker cruises around the rambling speculation landscape on a golfcart and adds names, numbers, and products. The marketing tour is somewhat like a performance whose words circulate through various bodies and objects. A Pile of Ghosts shows construction workers and real estate brokers at work—in authentic and also staged settings, in casting scenes and in changing roles. The so-called reality, at the same time, turns out to be increasingly porous, also hard lines of rupture become increasingly apparent in the retort-like surroundings. Dead new buildings and ruins, brokers and actors, documentation and fiction, simulation and lived experience, the sounds of a jackhammer and the romantic melody of an old Hollywood film. In the tumbledown “Swallow Hotel” in the hills of Chongqing, amidst persistent noises the dandyesque hotel owner Charles defies the turbo-capitalist urbanization process. A Pile of Ghosts layers the seemingly disparate building blocks to form the title’s “pile.” In the end, one ghost story absorbs the other.

Ella Raidel is a filmmaker, artist and researcher. She is Assistant Professor at NTU Singapore at ADM School of Art, Design and Media and WKWSCI School of Communication and Information. In her interdisciplinary work – films, videos, writings – she focuses on the socio-cultural impact of globalization with a focus on urbanization and Asian cinemas. She is interested in reflexive forms of narration in questioning the representation in documentary films. Her film-making corresponds with her writings on Sinophone cinema for researching the poetics in image-making. Her work has been presented and distinguished in numerous international film festivals, exhibitions and biennials.