Click here to download a typed interview with Lundahl & Seitl about An Elegy to the Medium of Film.

An Elegy proposes the hypothesis that we carry so much film inside us that we need very little external stimuli to create a cinematic experience. Visitors enter a darkened room in which they experience projections that play, not on the screen in front of them, but in their own consciousness.

Appropriated footage from film history alternates with periods of whiteouts and blackouts in the screening room. These periods of visual absence direct the viewer’s attention inwards where cinematic history merges with their own archive of lived experience.

Going back to the experimentation of the early days of cinema where Dziga Vertov explored the perspective of the camera, visitors of An Elegy are guided by a voice that takes on different appearances on the screen: I float next to a running horse…I see the back of a man… I stare at the water…The voice traverses into bodies and objects within found footage of historical films, re-enacted and filmed in 3D by the artists. Floating shots in architecture, including The Brueghel collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and The Life Drawing Room at the Royal Academy of Arts.

When the light is switched off on the projector, and the cinema room turns pitch black – as dark as any cave – the viewers are then set adrift inside the history of film, floating between epic scenes, sounds and locations. Panning, zooming and moving inside the memory of those images they just saw on the screen, still with the guidance of the voice and its perspective of the camera, but now in tandem with a physical hand-led choreography influenced by camera movements and film techniques, the projections triggered by the voice still produce images within the film tradition but in the mind of the viewers. But the mental perspective is measured against the friction with the physical movement and presence triggered by the unseen performer and the viewer’s body in the physical exhibition space.

Technique & Installation:

Solo Commission for Cinemas: Headphones, synchronized three-dimensional sound and touch from 6 unseen performers, sightless goggles, Sennheiser Wireless system, Light Controlled Room – DMX dimmer – Fresnel spotlights – Blackout, 3D Video Projector + lens shutter, Headphone Amp and extension cables.

Film Festivals, Exhibition installation: as above, plus an either purpose built installation of a cinema structure or existing blackbox or auditorium that can be transformed into a cinema.

This project is co-produced by NXTSTP, with support of The Culture Programme of the European Union. Co-producers: Göteborg Dans & Teater Festival, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival Groningen, steirischer herbst festival.


Context: A Cinema, Film Festival, Art Exhibition

Capacity & Duration: Guided Version: 6 visitors / 50 min. Installation Version: 30 visitors / 30 min.

Credits: Co-production NXSTP, Weld, Accelerator Stockholm.