Shown in Compétition #6.
Synopsis
Melting Rust explores the metaphorical power of colours. Inspired by an ideal city, Victoria (Transylvania, Romania), initially the tip of the petro-chemical industry, now ravaged by numerous accidents, it develops on hues with multiple evocations: green for nature, blue for the dream of a better life, red for love and drama, orange for rust… according to contrasting relationships, nothing being unequivocal.
Text from the selection committee
For those who have travelled, the words with which the authors describe this magnificent performance resonate perfectly. They constitute a doorway into the universe of the work. They may not be absolutely essential to access the constellation of meaning that motivated it - this question is difficult to answer - but they are there, said, written. The abstract plastic motifs organized in a warm chromatic palette could only suggest a vague theme of flow, fluidity, aqueous waves, supported in this by the sound flow combining crystalline timbres and resonances of anharmonic cymbals. Instead, for the one who has traveled, the semiotization towards which the words “petrochemicals”, “factory”, “unemployment”, “rust”, “dream”, “nature” point, mobilizes a phenomenal quantity of impressions and thoughts. Everything comes up! I am not against the factory, work, steel, but how, for whom, why, at what price? Europe is full of these ghosts, I mean, of these vestiges of factories.
Translation made by the translator www.DeepL.com/Translator
– F.T.
What is the starting point of Melting Rust?
For Victoria Day, a city in Transylvania, Romania, which has suffered a lot from the utopia of progress, and where we were going to go in residence in August 2019, Dana Diminescu, one of the two organizers, proposed us to intervene. (They are working together on a large multidisciplinary project around Victoria).
We imagined that we would see disused factories in ruins. I myself have often photographed rusted or broken objects, loose walls. In addition, I worked on scattered passages with grey, orange backgrounds, in dialogue with intense fuchsia, green or turquoise hues. I managed to assemble them according to a progression on which Jean-Jacques built the structure of his composition from which he improvised.
The soundtrack seems to me to have a very important role in your film. How did you think about the relationship between sound and image?
I wanted the music to remain very open, and not limit the interpretation of the images. Jean-Jacques and I refused the banal sound illustration and wanted to create surprises in the image/sound relationships, what Jean-Jacques calls ‘accidental synchronism’. I also asked him to insert some silences.
I borrowed the concept of accidental synchronicity from Jean Cocteau. If you know what you want and why you want it, it’s magic! A dialectic develops between music and images. I have classified the stamps according to calm moments and folds, with blades that break the morphing.
Can you detail the creation process? What technique did you use to design these images?
My images are programmed, entirely generated by numbers and geometric functions. Structurally in 3D, they are reduced to a moving surface facing the screen. The space exists inside this surface, diminished perhaps, but richer, because ambivalent, indeterminate, subjective… Then, I project colored lights on this surface. Playing with the parameters, incredible freedom offered by the programming, I was able to discover a negative light, inverted, black ! fascinating and very mysterious, which mixes with the other - or the other two - lights. As their respective spatial positions vary, they nuance the hues indefinitely. I make almost all the parameters evolve: slowly and automatically in the generative pieces, and more brutally in the performances.
As my images remain technically simple, I can animate them in real time (without calculation delays) and thus modulate them, activating them during the program execution via the keyboard, which allows the performance.
I always take my inspiration from the intentions of the author of the images. I ask a lot of questions. I like to surprise without being iconoclastic. For Melting Rust I use sounds that transform, and I play everything in real time, there is nothing recorded, I remain very attached to the instrumental gesture.
How long did it take to develop Melting Rust?
the previous sequences were almost completed (so several years !!), I needed at least one week full time to test, modulate, write and structure the progression. Then we did some dialogue tests with Jean-Jacques, two times two hours maybe? I showed him my sequences, he made me listen to various sounds. And we discussed their connections…
These are obviously years of work that allow you to create very quickly, with emotion. But to choose the right timbres, which for each of them corresponds to a different instrumental playing on my keyboard, it can take me a few days. Think long to act fast! I can’t wait to see and listen to our new interpretation.