Please read out our FAQ section to find out more.
Since 2013, we have been working together on artistic film projects that have both experimental and documentary features. For our trilogy „Natures“, consisting of the short films (Still Life, Kaltes Tal, Umbra), the Harz nature reserve and its highest mountain, the Brocken, were a recurring starting point and location for our films due to their mythological charge. In recent years, the landscape of the Harz has changed dramatically. Large parts of the nature reserve are threatened by rapid forest dieback. The cultural landscape we were previously familiar with has been transformed into a dystopian environment by the interplay of global warming, the monoculture of spruce forests and the associated infestation of the bark beetle. After some initial disconcertment, we realized that the dying of the forest plantations would lay the humus for a new biodiversity and that in the medium term a mixed forest could be established that would suit the local conditions. The processes of the Anthropocene initiated by an antique Christian model of belief are based on a hierarchization of man, which results in the demarcation and subjugation of „nature“. Our work attempts to overcome the existing dividing lines by adopting the speculative perspective of a tree and thus establishing it as a subject. Geology also allows a position that goes beyond an anthropocentric view; it creates a planetary time window that puts human history into perspective. A 300-million-year-old primeval forest, located in what is now Chemnitz, was once covered by volcanic ash and silica turned the once tropical trees to stone. The fossil find appears to us as a silent witness of time, reaching from the past into the future and telling of a constant metamorphism of things. The oldest solar observatory in the world - the Neolithic circular complex at Goseck - was probably used to observe the sky for calendrical purposes and also for ritual acts. The wooden palisade circles, which are aligned with the course of the sun, reminded us of the structure of a zoetrope. We imagined an equally anestral and futuristic figure of light, striving for alternative spheres of being by means of ecstatic techniques: „One is not in the world, one becomes with the world, one becomes in its contemplation. Everything is seeing, becoming. You become the universe. Becoming-animal, becoming-plant, becoming-molecular, becoming-zero.
Country: Germany
T-Port Partner: AG Kurzfilm
As an artist duo, Florian Fischer and Johannes Krell have been working at the interface of film and visual art since 2013. Their non-verbal, cinematic works function as resonating bodies for the ambivalent relationships between human and non-human actors. The artists aim to undermine dualistic thought patterns that seek to differentiate between nature and culture, the animate and the inanimate, the normative and the monstrous, and fact and fiction, in order to occupy the shimmering spaces in between. Their works have been shown at several international film festivals (including IFF Rotterdam, IDFA Amsterdam, Berlinale, IFF Chicago, HotDocs Toronto) and have been awarded the German Short Film Award and the Golden Bear (Berlinale Shorts). Fischer and Krell are supported artists of the media art association Werkleitz and members of the film collective FILZ in Leipzig. Their works are in the distribution program of Light Cone Paris and the video art foundation imai in Düsseldorf.
A cloud of ash lands in the waves of a river. Light enters the interior...
