Moving Stills
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Belen Cerezo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The exposition 'Moving Stills' addressees the issue of still photographs that move, in other words, that contain movement through expounding and scrutinising the images that emerge from re-filming a still image. These images could be defined as still and moving image at the same time and here I will call them still-moving. This interrogation draws on the discursive notion of the rostrum camera — a film-making technique based on re-filming still images usually employed in animation and in documentary films and it is composed by a performance-lecture 'Moving Stills' and the artwork 'Moving Stills, Moving Stones'.
The performance-lecture explores certain images that are still and also moving images. The first part of this performance-lecture reflects upon genealogies of the so-called still and so-called moving image. The second one brings to the fore the images that challenge this distinction and introduces the specific case of the ‘rostrum camera’. Finally, the last part presents three excerpts of documentary films in which the technique of the rostrum camera has been employed ‘to move’, in the sense of to set into motion, still images.
The artwork 'Moving Stills, Moving Stones' is composed by two videos, one in a titled monitor on the floor and the other on a flat screen. The monitor shows a ‘sequence’ of a stone-lifting from the film Ama Lur, 1973, also included in the performance-lecture Moving Stills, that. Next, the flat tv displays a video that begins with the technique of the ‘rostrum camera’ applied on still photographs that depict hands (extended palms with outspread fingers, clenched fist…) and later these same images are activated through the tactic ‘performing documents’. The work draws an explicit parallel between lifting stones and the artistic endeavour ‘to move’ images and it acknowledges that the haptic is located between the so-called still and so-called moving image.
This exposition is part of the submission for the PhD study "What is it ‘to move’ a photograph?
Artistic tactics for destabilizing and transforming images".