ngg_shortcode_0_placeholder<\/p>\n
TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES Catalina Niculescu, Along the Lines, UK-Romania, 2011, 16 min Thom Andersen, Reconvers\u00e3o, Portugal, 2012, 65 min TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES ALONG THE LINES RECONVERS\u00c3O<\/strong>
\nSaturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT 3<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>On a trip to her native Romania, the artist\u2019s interest in architectural forms prompted a visual investigation into how decorative and structural motifs recur in buildings from the traditional to the modern.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Invited to film in Portugal on the occasion of the Vila do Conde festival\u2019s 20th anniversary, Thom Andersen chose to document building projects by Eduardo Souto de Moura, whose work combines modernist aesthetics with traces of the architectural history of his sites. Incorporating local materials with contemporary building techniques, his clean concrete lines harmonise with natural elements and traditional stone walls. Influenced in equal measure by Mies van der Rohe and minimal sculptors such as Judd and Morris, Souta de Moura\u2019s achievements include meticulous linear houses, the Porto subway network, and the monumental Braga Stadium, which rises out of the earth beside a mountain of imposing granite. This leisurely film features 17 such projects and culminates in a conversation between the filmmaker and the distinguished architect.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Saturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT 3<\/p>\n
\nCatalina Niculescu, UK-Romania, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 16 min
\n<\/strong>Following up the artist\u2019s recent journey to Romania, Along the Lines<\/em> initially started as \u2018a study into vernacular elements of Romanian modernist architecture\u2019. In the final project (including a series of collages) the premise is present, recognizable, but is not made explicit. The work deliberately strays from the plan of rigorous study and develops into a visual exercise in which the assumed subjectivity of the artist becomes the mode of argument. The interference vernacular\/modernist is not stated or articulated directly but built up on a set of formal associations and visual suggestions. The artist\u2019s approach becomes calm and poetic; free from a precise mission the project embraces the accidental, the deviation, it accumulates discordant elements to produce new possibilities though vulnerable and problematic, the pleasure of the argument comes into play, it disperses from concept into the aesthetic. Comprising a set of chapters, Along the Lines<\/em> retraces the visual journey of the artist to explore architecture through a meticulous focus on details and geometric shapes. Each \u2018chapter\u2019 is preceded by a postcard collage: one geometrical figure is cut out of a natural landscape which literally illustrates the connection idealized by modernists between architecture and natural environment, placing in this way the interest for simple forms into the simplicity of nature. Although at the end of the video you find yourself back to the same landscape, the perception changes, the view is the same, yet your experience is different this time. (Anca Rujoiu)<\/p>\n
\nThom Andersen, Portugal, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 65 min
\n<\/strong>Reconvers\u00e3o<\/em> portrays 17 buildings and projects by Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura, accompanied usually by his own writings. It is a search for his architecture, without critical commentary. Only the tour guide at Braga Stadium offers generalizations, which fit that work well enough, but it may be the exception not the rule. Souto Moura has the last word: \u2018If there is nothing there, I invent a preexistence.\u2019 Technically, Reconvers\u00e3o<\/em> combines the crudeness of proto-cinema with the hyperrealism of digital cinema, bringing us back to the ideals of Dziga Vertov. Shooting only one or two frames per second and animating the images, in the manner of Muybridge, produces greater resolution, although not necessarily a greater sense of reality, and brings attention to the movements of water and vegetation that generally pass unnoticed. (Thom Andersen)<\/p>\n