Featuring the work of Austrian artist and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann at UnionDocs for a night of cinema and conversation filmmaker Anthony Svate.

Nov 7, 2024 at 7:30 pm

“In this selection of short films we have a series of works that incessantly asks “Where are we?” because entirely posed by the apparatus of image and sound itself. Truttmann, who in the years covered here (2009-2022) found herself far-flung in Istanbul, Val Verde (a Los Angeles outskirts), Shanghai, the woods of southern Estonia, and the mountains of Santa Cruz California, before returning to Vienna (her home), has extensively and directly treated the subject of “the uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”, literally “un-home-like”) in her feature film Tarpaulins (2017), and it’s one concept of many ecstatically made concrete and phenomenal – enacted, embraced, and even battled in these shorts.

Truttmann gives us firm locales and solid objects and ideas to grasp, while vigorously separating their form and content before our eyes. Plays on the solidity and contingency of color, surface, word, sound, observation, sociology and ecology, take flight from their origin and assumed stability, disperse and recreate themselves before landing back in a reality of changed perception. Figuration itself becomes a means to discover its situation, its grounds, both globally and particularly, within its culture, and nakedly without it. The placeness of things and thingness of place, or simply the placement of a color becomes phenomenal, upending. Human and animal restlessness are united, ordinary things and situations are given termitic specificity and true characters emerge.”

– Short adaptation from a text by Andy Rector