Limits. Short film

The aim was to create a film that would embody the dream experience. According to Gilles Fauconnier in his book ‘Mental Spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language’, mental space is a space of imagination, the imaginary space that the speaker refers to. So anything can be the mental space, if only the person can construct or recall it from the memory. And I have chosen the dream for my mental space at this stage. But as the dream experience is very personal, and true only for one person, I couldn’t avoid making a film very personal as well.

Reading Freud and his ‘Interpretations of dreams’, I found this idea: if a dream can be analyzed through recollection of the memories that have formed it, then it should be possible to form a dream through building the train of memories, that would have connection, and form an ‘artificial dream’.

I have used my personal recent memories to filter the ones, which would occur in my own dreams, and using them, I have recreated a dream that I could have had. Using the fear of height as the starting point, I have recalled places with the same feeling to it. I have looked at the fear of height not as a phobia, but as the strong restriction of the available ‘active space’, the space where it is possible to move. It could be argued that fear of heights is quite close to claustrophobia, if looking at it from this point of view. So this idea led me to the main theme for my film: exploration of the limits (both emotional, or attached to people, and physical).

Design Proposal for Multi-Faith Prayer Room

The challenge we had to face was that the room is basically a closed box with no windows and low ceilings. The task was to design a multi-faith prayer room, that could also be used as a 'quiet room', and could be used for up to 30 people at once for Friday prayer. 

As some religions require strong orientation in the room(for ex. Muslims have to face South-East when praying) and flexible devision for male and female, we have decided to install a glass wall with the textile (that my partner for this project has created) between two glass panels onto the South-Eastern corner, and it is also lit from the behind, to create a sense of opening in the room, almost like a large window. 

The choice of colour palette came from nature: beige, golden and brown for earth, blue and turquoise are for the sky. We have chosen neutral colours and design for this room, because there shouldn't be anything flashy, when the room has to be a place, where people can relax and reflect.

 As all the lights are installed in the floor along the walls, it creates the sense of lightness and the walls are almost floating. Three roman curtains in the middle of the room can provide desirable devision and can be regulated in height and density. 

The washing facilities also needed to be redesigned, as Muslim Religion requires to have hands and feet washed before the pray. So a foot bath with a low separate shower for all the needs has been installed, and as it is completely flush with the floor, it keeps the desirable effect of modern neutral interior.

in a search of a surrealist interior: 'Inscape' by Matta

image source

'..search the interior depth of the psyche analogous to evocative metaphors of the natural landscape.'
(Mical, Thomas. 'Surrealism and Architecture, p.53)

the beauty of broken prospectives, where everything appears to be imagination in a sever vertigo,
where you can see so many things, but wait,
not to see them,
to imagine them, to reflect yourself onto the canvas, to be possessed by this surreal interior of the canvas,
where canvas is an escape from the surrounding,
or it is the surrounding, while you are approaching your subconsciousness. 

in a search of surrealist interiors: Andre Breton, 42 Rue Fontaine

image source

image source 

'..Surrealist appropriation of lived space aimed to inhabit not the private sphere as such but the dialectic between personal and collective, and the complex to and fro between the closed/occulted and the public/exhibited politics, space and actions that formed the hub of French surrealism's problems of inter-war years...

..A significant purpose of Breton's home was thus to shelter a physical and intellectual connection of objects whose prime function was to locate the self with the wider world outside. The status of these collections as poetic rather than archival or taxonometric encounters were further enhanced  by the inevitable shifts and rearrangements of their display, open to the dynamics of change and accident...'

( Thomas Mical, 'Surrealism and Architecture', 2005)

Little Rock'n'Rolla's T-shirts

custom design t-shirts for the new generation.

Space of Infinity

Filming in four different locations I have tryed to bring them into one experince of an ‘endless tunnel’, whithout the exit. I have deliberately picked the tunnles with blank walls for the final edit, to keep the same theme throughout the journey. I have also excluded most of the scenes with people, and only kept them in one scene, where they are far away and appear as sillhouttes, rather than clear figures. I believe, that this has allowed me to keep the ‘dreaminess’ of the film better and to express that the shown experience is only possible and true for one person at the time.

This film has no start and no ending.

The text that is being said is made so, that it appears being on a loop, it does not have an intro, nor the final sentence. As i am investigating the mental space, which only exists in one’s head (in this case in the imagination of the maker), i have kept the theme of dream and uncertanty throughout the film.

Sigmund Freud 'Uncanny'-extractions and notes

image sourse


'...We can collect all those properties of persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations which arouses in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what they all have in common... The 'uncanny' is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar... The familiar can become uncanny and frightening.

...We tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

...Intellectual uncertainty: so that that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.

...According to him [Schelling] everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

...'doubts whether an apparently animate being as really alive; or or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact aminate' (Jentsch)

...We know from psychoanalytic experience... that fear of damaging or loosing one's eyes is a terrible fear of childhood... No bodily injury is so much dreaded by them [adults] as an injury to the eye.

...It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But these factors do not solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition-not everything that is connected with repressed desires and archaic forms of thought belonging to the past of the individual and of the race-is therefore uncanny.

...An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.'