Text on practice s.c.p.k

The weather today is cloudy. That is not new, nor the winter air of the city of Rotterdam. It is the end of January, 2023. Things are happening in the world, different from last year but the same in other ways. This time last year, I was word and speech-less in an effort to understand myself as an artist. I was still in the process of application, to sit in the seat I currently sit in.

~365 days later, I wrestle with crafting a text on practice. Where to start? Thankfully, I have a pool of material to pull from and reflect on. Material that over the last 4.5 months has been bubbling and boiling together, providing me an (un?)conscious path to follow in verbalizing my practice.

The short film I have recently completed, Dear Moritz is a step towards building my practice on a certain foundation of methodology. This work involves a sort of encounter that I captured in public space, between a civilian and police officers and eventually also a friend of mine and myself. The film intends to give space to viewers to witness reality as it is (through an uncut sequence in 'real' life). But rather than submitting to a doctrine of direct cinema (a movement I have become very fascinated by) I also work with a non-linear editing approach in presenting 'real' life through my own perspective and how I understand it, fragmented and differing in perspective. It conjours up questions of privilege, power relations and authority but it ultimately speaks to discourse surrounding colonial histories, the connection to these in the present day through ideological structure (statues and sculptures of figures, in this case) and how human beings of different backgrounds or mindsets interact, get by or feel regarding this. The day I shot the film, I was waiting for a friend. We had planned to film something else in his neighborhood, but he was late. It was a sunny Sunday in mid-november. I shot the film independently. I also edited on my own. The structure of the edit was shaped through workshopping and critiques with classmates and teachers. However, the work (and the approach I aim to continue to use) is an essentially collaborative one. The civilian I filmed