EMPTY STATES
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music by Julia Kent
video by Jola Kudela
supported in part by North Devon Artist Residency 2019
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Best Experimental Film at Super Shorts Film Festival NewYork 2021
Best Experimental Film at Obskuur Ghent Film Festival 2021
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Museum de Arte Moderna Rio deJaneiro - DOBRA Festival International de Cinema Experimental
2020NIFF LONDON - New Indie Film Festival of London - 2020
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I did an art residency in Devon last year, filming local landscapes and seascapes. I would set out every morning, carrying my camera, tripod, and the rest of the equipment on my back. An each day I would pass a narrow path leading up a mountain. It was steep and looked too much for my heavy load, but I felt this mysterious pull towards it. I simply had to climb it.
It was a heavy climb, but when I get to the very top of it, I saw a strange pile of stones covered in fog. What was this place? I started asking around, and soon I discovered that it was in fact a holy mountain.
It’s called Holdstone Down and according to the Aertherius Society it’s the place where Jesus – and by Jesus they mean the Earth’s incarnation of an extraterrestrial “Cosmic Master” - appeared to their founder, on the 23rd July 1958.
There are 19 Aertherian holy mountains, scattered across the world but Holdstone Down is the most important. Every year on the 23rd July, hundreds of people climb Holdstone Down bringing new stones to the pile. They believe that by doing so they charge a special battery with spiritual energy to be released when the world will most need it.
Aertherians believe that through their spiritual action they can bring a state of balance back to humanity. It may sound like an old wife’s tale but their intentions are good.
Julia’s music, with its haunting basslines and looped harmonies, is eerie and emotional. For me it speaks of temporality and transience of us, as humans, and of our habitat, the Earth. It feels quite apocalyptic in a way, but there is also hope in it. Just as Aertherians believe that they can restore balance on Earth with their spiritual energy, so in my video to Julia’s track, the darkness and apocalyptic gloom is dispelled by the power of natural harmonies and the Earth organic rhythms. The ebb and flow of the waves, the wind, the moving trees, creates a new order of things, driven by the gritty complexity of Julia’s track. It seems quite destructive, but at the end it brings harmony and peace.
The search for particular ways for image production is what distinguishes the creative processes in experimental cinema. This invention, historically founded, is to propose new ways of viewing, to stress the relationship between the viewer and the screen in mental and even physical layers. So it is common to establish symbiotic relations with science and arts, creating, many times, a confluence between the aesthetic research and the scientific research. The relations with the arts – music, poetry, painting, sculpture -, as with the rethought handling of technological objects, and not only the top notch, but also the exploration of those considered outdated, by trying to show their capabilities in a wide manner. In both cases they converge into aesthetic formulations that when presented to the audience open up in possibilities of interaction with the world.
LUIZ GARCIA curator of INVESTIGAÇÕES E LABORAÇÕES EM MODOS DE VER - INVESTIGATIONS AND ELABORATIONS IN THE WAYS OF SEEING https://festivaldobra.com.br and Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro