Face to Face was selected at the Venice Shorts Film Festival 2021 and shown at the experimental short section.

Starting from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No exit, I made a series of short videos in which I’m exploring the body from different angles in the frame and the gaze in its various forms – the gaze of the camera, the gaze of the audience and the gaze of the performer and ultimately the relationship that is formed between them.

Based on Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist play "No Exit". “Of course, it is not precisely the eyes as psychological organs which look at me: it is the other person as a subject, a counsciousness. The gaze of the other person includes all kinds of judgements and evaluations. Being seen by the other person means to grasp oneself as an unknown object of unrecognizable judgements. A judgement according to Sartre is the transcendental act of a free person. The fact of being seen changes me into a being without defences against a freedom which is not my freedom. Being seen by the other person makes us slaves; looking at the person, we are masters. I am a slave as long as I depend in my being on the freedom of another self, which is not mine but a condition of my being. And I am master, when I make the other self depend for its being on my freedom.” In these short videos I am exploring the relationship between the different types of gazes: the camera's eye, the audience and the performer

Exit was selected at Short to The Point International Film Festival 2020 at the Mini Short section

Arnis Contemporary Art Residency, Germany, 2019 (https://ramosluebbert.com/projects/)

Collaborative project

Image: Elodie Chiper

Sound: Richard Melkonian

Shot during Arnis Contemporary Art Residence with composer/filmmaker Richard Melkonian, 2019, it was projected on a boat sail in an abandoned Halle in Arnis, Germany

 

Kaddish
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894—1956

IV

O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten
O mother
farewell
with a long black shoe
farewell
with Communist Party and a broken stocking
farewell
with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast
farewell
with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina
farewell
with your sagging belly
with your fear of Hitler
with your mouth of bad short stories
with your fingers of rotten mandolins
with your arms of fat Paterson porches
with your belly of strikes and smokestacks
with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War
with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers
with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of Newark
with your eyes
with your eyes of Russia
with your eyes of no money
with your eyes of false China
with your eyes of Aunt Elanor
with your eyes of starving India
with your eyes pissing in the park
with your eyes of America taking a fall
with your eyes of your failure at the piano
with your eyes of your relatives in California
with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an aumbulance
with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots
with your eyes going to painting class at night in the Bronx
with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape
with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an aumbulance
with your eyes strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes with the pancreas removed
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes of abortion
with your eyes of ovaries removed
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your Death full of Flowers

narrated & performed by Elodie Chiper

ANNOUNCEMENT

This video poem (made in collaboration with the French musician Stephane Argillet Stereovoid and Latvian poet Sergej Timofejev) speaks about the fragility of a life full of layers existing somewhere in time. Which time? Just time. It could be be the past, or it may be the future. It’s a mix of gestures, repetition, closeups all happening in the space of the 80s Paris metro. The fluidity of each shot contrasts the rigidity of the movements.