Week 3: Intuition:Eternity

When kindred spirits come together, exciting possibilities begin to percolate and creativity abounds. Three cheers for Gnomecore trailblazers, Stuart Ian Frost, Vague Research Studios, the welcoming women at Saltholmens Kallbadhus (where you dip nude in the cold cold ocean and tell stories in the hot hot sauna), this week’s marvellous map-makers, fearless Fika Friday fibre art explorers, and powerful pinhole adventurers, new feline friend Scarlett, and especially the amazing, inspiring, effervescent and universally beloved Super 8 goddess Dagie Brundert who brought the magic all the way by train from Berlin for our very first Intuition:Eternity workshop and left behind the wonderful workshop photos we share with you here.

This heart is bursting with gratitude…

Week 2: If You Build It, They Will Come

Hello, Snow! The flakes started falling on Monday and continued to enchant us straight through Sunday, with breaks now and then for sunshine and brilliant blue sky. The little deer family left their prints across the pristine drifts around Konstepidemin in the early mornings; on Saturday evening, a big long-eared rabbit hippity hopped right down the length of the little green space in front of our studio. One creature who was not doing much hopping around in the white stuff was JoJo The Katt who preferred to keep his own little snowshoes dry and warm inside!

The week otherwise was all about A-R-T. Planning it, making it, talking about it, looking at it, thinking about it, putting it up and sharing it! There were ideas to hatch, fallen branches to gather, tools to source (thanks for the magic key, Emma!), benches and birdhouses to build, images to assemble, cyanotypes to steam, holes to drill, pins to push and lights to point (hooray for Dorna, Erik, Klara and Emelie!). In between we spent a couple hours with students at the Göteborgs Konstskola (thanks to Director of Studies, Lars Wulcan for the invite!) chatting about some of our favourite female experimental filmmakers including Sweden’s own Gunvor Nelson, made a joyful pilgrimage to our beloved Solrosen vegetarian restaurant, fika’d a most magnificent fika with the incomparable Ulla, took multiple trips to three different thrift stores, checked out the Konstskola open studios, drank many hot beverages with Maria, and lunched with visiting artists from Finland, Mexico and Stockholm.

Late Friday afternoon our little exhibition, A Little Something, opened alongside a giant Konstepidemin Artists + Friends group show plus installations by Tone Linghult and Andrea Coyotzi Borja & Anna Jensen, and woooooeee what an opening it was! Over 600 people stopped by over the course of three hours to check out a mind-blowing array of work and welcome us to the community. And the people kept coming all through Galleri hours on Saturday and Sunday, dropping by to draw, knit, read, meet the Katt, talk, tell stories and make A Little Something with us.

What better way to top off a wild and wonderful week than a cozy Sunday night studio dinner with Linus and Maria… we made the soup and they brought the semla! Life is sweet.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Sweden!

In the fall of 2016, we spent several wondrous weeks in Gothenburg, Sweden as part of collaborative creativity experience that resulted in The Sound We See: A Göteborg City Symphony. Seven years later, we’re back Konstepidemin art center for a 3-month return engagement thanks to IASPIS and our dear friend Maria Magnusson.

As we settle in, we share with you some images from Week 1 which included JoJo’s first Trans-Atlantic journey (He did great! Thank you KLM flight attendants and fellow passengers for being so sweet!), a quick trip to Copenhagen (for Maria and I to reconnect with fellow Film Farm-er Caroline Monnet, in Denmark for her exhibition at Køs Museum and check out work by Francis Alys and James Turrell at Copenhagen Contemporary while we were at it), the beginnings of bird houses, my first semla, some lovely walks, talks and thrift store shops, plus, of course, NAPS.

October 2022: Dreams Come True

For years, Paolo dreamed of being in Winnipeg.

I mean, while sleeping he had recurring dreams of walking the streets of Winnipeg, to the point where he felt like he had actually been there…had memories of being there…but he hadn’t. Except in his dreams, of course.

What was the magnetic pull? The city’s location at the centre of the North America? Guy Madden’s surrealist cinema? Portage & Main as rocked up by Neil Young? Métis Culture? The Royal Art Lodge? Its proud standing as Slurpee Capital of the World? The nickname “Winterpeg” – ie: where “temperatures have been as cold as the surface of Mars”? Who knows… but when shimby said, “We gotta get you two to WNDX for a Sound We See: Treaty 1” that was the beginning of a dream come most magnificently true!

Thanks to our fierce, freaky and fabulously talented filmmakers Allison Kolynchuk Amanda Kindzierski, Ed Ackerman, Evan, Heidi Phillips, Hunter, Jasper, Leigh Anne Parry, Mikhail Kolybaba, Myra, Omid Moterassed, Rhayne Vermette, shimby, and Vauxvon.

Gratitude to B.P. for the incredible live score.

High fives to shimby, Heidi and the whole WNDX 2022 team for a kick ass festival that makes space for truly radical experimental cinema in a joyful, loving context. Appreciation to Winnipeg Film Group, The Winnipeg Cinematheque, Winnipeg Arts Council, Platform Centre for Photographic & Digital Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the Festival and The Sound We See: A Treaty 1 Community Symphony.

Shout out to Plain Bicycle Project for making it possible to pedal our way all around your wild, wacky, wonderful town. And to Leigh Anne & Fam, Adrian Alphonso & the Decolonize Thanksgiving Bike Jam, and Rayne & Fam for the best-ever second Monday in October.

Giant hugs to community cinema superstar, Hagere Selam “shimby” Zegeye-Gebrehiwot… “It takes one to know one!”

We love you, Winnipeg!!!

May 26:22: Magic at 18 Frames A Second

The Sound We See: A Baltimore City Symphony premiered on May 26 to a wildly enthusiastic audience at the historic Parkway Theater: a magnificent culmination of a most extraordinary week in Baltimore! Congrats to filmmakers Paris Bishop, Victor Rei Brown, Lara Grantz, Kai Hams, Denzel Mitchell III, Seamus Mogge, Amirah Peay, Dylan Pritzlaff, Sophia Richardson, Adyn Rosenberg, Donovan Simpson, Grace Sutherland, A.W. Taylor, and Rachael Tyler who wholeheartedly dove into this cinematic adventure and captured the resonant complexity of their town and their times so beautifully. Hats off to musicians Quinn Rehkemper (Saxophone), Leo Ross (Saxophone), Odelia Elliott (Electric Guitar), Benjamin Murray (Upright Bass), Daniel Fairlie (Drums) who embraced live improve for the first time and came up with a collective score that brought the house down. This was the first collaboration between the Music and Visual Storytelling departments at the Baltimore School For The Arts and we sure hope it won’t be the last! Experience the magic here.

Big shout out to all the organizations and individuals who made this project possible: Charles C. Baum Film & Visual Storytelling Lead Funders Patricia and Mark Joseph, a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bea Bufrahi, Rosiland Cauthen, Ed Hrybyk, Pat Galluzzo, Sandra Gibson, Joe Giordano, Greg Golinski, Christy LeMaster, Nancy Steiner, Imbie Tamba, Brigid Zuknick and most especially our dear Meg Rorison without whom The Sound We See: Baltimore would never have come to be.

May 23.22: Secret Ingredient

Epic day in the lab processing 11 rolls of film back to back: everything needs to get done today and everything needs to turn out because there’s no time and no film for reshoots! So we say a little prayer, add a dash of our special secret ingredient–a magical elixer comprised of the Wild Weeds of Baltimore we’ve been foraging from cracks in the sidewalk and down the little lanes–and stir the brew exactly 99 times in a counter-clockwise direction (okay, I made that part up), add it to the tank and rock it like a baby for 18 minutes (this part is true), rinse, fix, rinse again and then, FINALLY, the big reveal: IMAGES, GLORIOUS IMAGES!!!!!!!!! 11 for 11! We got a movie! Special thanks to BSA teacher and renowned social justice photographer Joe Giordano for generously sharing your darkroom, your powerful images, and your 80s playlist that transported me right back to the raucous bush parties of my Canadian youth.

May 22.22: Put A Bird On It

You’ve probably heard about the Baltimore Orioles, named after Maryland’s official state bird (Fun fact: an earlier baseball team in the city also named the Orioles moved to New York City in 1903 to become the Yankees!) but what about the Ravens? I’m not much of a football fan so I didn’t know that when the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore in the 90’s the citizens got to vote on the new name (proposed options included the Americans, the Marauders and the Railers) and chose the Ravens in honor of the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe (who wasn’t even originally from Baltimore, but died here under mysterious circumstances in 1849). Anyway, all this to say, Baltimore is truly for the birds.

We flocked together for Grace’s 2 pm film shoot at Belevedere Square Market (“Where Ordinary Meets Extraordinary”) and then flew through the (booze free) Sunday streets arriving home just in time to watch a magnificent storm roll in: rolling thunder and lashes of lightening followed by torrential rain…oooeeee, let it come down! We’re soaked to the bone by the time we get to True Vine Records for Seamus’s 9 pm punk rock party but who cares? It’s Sunday night and the kids are alright!