Bots, Eliane Esther (NL)
| 2012-01-04 20:07:48
BADGAST artist in residence December 2011/February 2012
www.twosmallthings.com
'Dome - The cone of silence', videowork (17 min.) produced at BADGAST by artist/filmmaker Eliane Esther Bots. This video has been selected out of 2800 films for the International Short Film Festival - Curta Cinema Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2012.
Eliane participates in the pool of photographers/videomakers who document presentations of Badgast artist in residents.
Previous for Satellietgroep: 'Fieldwork' 2010, roadmovie parallel to the Dutch coast with urbanist Jan de Graaf, screened at CCC@Istanbul2010 in Istanbul and screened at Istanbul2010-SCH2011 at the Cinema at Sea at Badgast.
Eliane is co-curator for 'Now Wakes The Sea' the Black Sea/North Sea cultural exchange project and visited Moldava, Russia and Georgia for connecting to cultural partners.
Video: 'Dome - The Cone of Silence' by Eliane Esther Bots
English text below
'The cone of silence' is een omgekeerd kegelvormig gebied direct boven de antenne van een radiobaken. Signalen zijn daar niet waarneembaar. Vlak voordat een signaal verdwijnt in 'the cone of silence' is het volume sterker.
In de korte film 'The cone of silence' worden drie mannen gevolgd. Zij bezoeken met grote regelmaat de kust. Hun motieven zijn verschillend. Gedurende de film wordt duidelijk dat de kust een plek is om alleen te zijn, herinneringen op te halen, te dagdromen en te verlangen naar andere werelden. Beeld, tekst en geluid verbinden deze verhalen over het kustgebied met elders. De kust als stiltegebied, waar het geluid wegsterft.
‘The cone of silence' is an inverted cone-shaped region immediately above the antenna of a radio beacon. Signals are imperceptible. Just before the signal disappears into ‘the cone of silence’ the volume is stronger.
In the short film ‘The cone of silence’ three men are followed. They visit the coast with great regularity. Their motives are different. During the film it becomes clear that the coast is a place to be alone, reminiscing, daydreaming and longing for other worlds. Image, text and sound connect these stories about the coastal area to places elsewhere. The coast as a sanctuary, where the sound dissolves.
Eliane Esther Bots is a video artist, teacher in art academy Utrecht (HKU) and at this moment participates in the Post graduate 'Documentary and contemporary art' in France.
Her work balances between film, documentary, cinéma vérité and visual art. She often uses material that could be called "documentary". At the same time she takes the freedom, during filming and editing, to change and adjust the situation, setting and storyline. This borderland, where visual art and documentary come together, gives her the possibility to recreate a new reality. With her work she shows the visual cinematic beauty within reality and the daily life surrounding us.
For her work she often travels and stays at unknown places. The last three years she especially focussed on Eastern-Europe and Russia to make new works.
This October she went to St. Petersburg Russia to participate in the Videoforma festival at the Kuryokhin (www.kuryokhin.net) center for contemporary art. Here she also gave a lecture 'In touch with reality' which concentrated on (Dutch) video art that has a strong connection with reality. In the lecture the diverse ways of 'using reality' were discussed and works of Roy Villevoye, Martha Atienza, Luuk Wilmering, Martine Stig, Jeroen Kooijmans, Jeroen Kooijmans and others were shown.
She just finished the short film 'The captain and the boy' (see stills).
In this film a father and a son cross a river several times. At the same time a story about a found dying bird and a dog unfolds. The river in the video turns out to have a deeper unexpected meaning in the end.
The film consist out of moving images, animation and still images and is shot in color and black and white. Documentary material shot in Russia and staged material is combined in the film.
At this moment she is working on a new film which will be a combination of interviews with former workers of the navy factory in Kronstadt, a port-city on the island Kotlin (Russia), a folk dance group and a staged story about a man who has a dream to fly his two meter long model plan
Stills: 'The captain and the boy'
