Zhuang's second draft ToP

1. What have you been making? 2. How did you do it? (method)

Since last winter, I have been constantly going to several sites around the Rotterdam Port with cameras and microphones, where I started to develop a short film around Hook van Holland, a recreational area located on the edge of the industrial expanse of the Rotterdam Port.

Initiated by my interest in industrial landscapes and fuelled by my curiosity to explore the city of Rotterdam as a newcomer, I began to visit these significant industrial locations on a weekly basis. I allowed myself and the camera to roam freely with the landscape, practicing paying attention while simultaneously documenting these landscapes through imagery and sound. The continual revisits enhance the bodily experience, and the documented material serves as footage and maps, offering opportunities for distant study and meditation on these sites. Learning from each editing session and viewing, I develop starting points for each next visit and the next stage of observation, and further contextualise the landscape within my physicality and the broader environment.

In the later stages of editing the film, the durational and structural arrangement of these observations and documentations try to ask two questions that are raised throughout the process: How does a landscape affect individuals and their personal narratives? Who has the power to alter the landscape?

3. Relation to previous practice?

It’s a continuation of my exploration of the idea of structural film. I imposed a specific structure through the making and editing of this film, intended to explore the idea of sculpting time and light through moving images. Furthermore, the elements of duration and pace also emerge as necessary components within the framework of this film, it intricately calls to the essence of film as a time-defined medium and intends to create a meditative experience through the speed it suggests. It indicates the questions that constantly appear and are addressed in my previous works: How do we experience time? How do cinema/images alter our perception of time? And What does it mean to pay attention?

4. What do you want to make next? 5. Why do you want to make it?

I want to experiment with the process of analog filmmaking. Working with analog moving images not only explores the materiality of the medium but also engages in conversation with the history of (experimental) film. I am always fascinated by the idea of recording (sculpting) light directly onto film and also think the form and aesthetic of structural film have a strong relationship with the practice of analog processing and editing. By working with analog, I want to further my understanding of this specific way of filmmaking and its history.

Departing from the idea of working with analog, I further want to explore film projection installation and the idea of expanded cinema -- thinking about different ways of presenting a moving image work, experimenting with the idea of light in the space, inconsistent time, allowing the audience to enter and leave, and how this break of linearity would change a moving image work. I intend to explore the political nature of the modernist aesthetic, which lies between the audience and the film. Instead of a picture being projected directly into the mind, I like the idea of the film projection working as an image and light source to be experienced.

Other than that, narrative in structural films is also something I want to work on. My current works are often quite abstract, and I want to continue this abstract way of filming but also experiment with narrative, in a way to be able to communicate with the audience through a different tunnel. I constantly think about the literature movement Oulipo and the film A.K.A. Serial Killer by Masao Adachi, and Landscape Suicide by James Benning. I want to explore how the form of storytelling can bring things into the narrative and how a narrative can breathe in a fixed structure.

6. Relation to a larger context

Landscape and industrial pollution(social aspect around it) How does a landscape affect individuals and their personal narratives? Who has the power to alter the landscape? Modernism aesthetic in art history Structuralism

7. References

Landscape Theory: Post-1968 Radical Cinema in Japan A.K.A. Serial Killer by Masao Adachi Landscape Suicide by James Benning Art and Objecthood by Michael Fried Oulipo