Martin Siewert
2021Monroc
Michaela Grill, Martin Siewert
"Lost Destinations" is the name of a Web site dedicated to obscure locations in the USA. "Abandoned, unusual, wild and weird road trip photography and beyond" is presented for the viewer´s pleasure, including illustrations of an abandoned concrete and building-material factory in Idaho Falls (the "Monroc Facility"), which is the starting point for Michaela Grill´s video of the same name. A still image of the picturesque industrial ruin appears repeatedly throughout the half-hour work like a refrain, its stanzas comprising three independent abstract studies. The soundtrack by Martin Siewert underlines the suite´s synesthetic character, such as by casting acoustic shadows in places where the video image builds on musical parameters such as rhythm, timbre and tonality. When the color and brightness of individual images are modulated in the reprise, the three episodes independently sample a range of more abstract visual characteristics.
Monroc
Trans
Michaela Grill, Martin Siewert
With trans, Martin Siewert and I used the 5 act structure of classical drama to create an atmosphere of in-between-ness and levitation. I found these old photographs of a harbor that totally embodied this emotion (also the sadness and melancholy of parting and saying goodbye). So I used them as my starting images and worked through the layers of the images, scratched away the unnecessary until I reached the essence.
Trans
Cityscapes
Michaela Grill, Martin Siewert
The perception of the city in the modern era is characterized by its fleeting and momentary nature. Social and architectural constructions are fragmented and dashing past. Cityscapes attempts to make archived recordings from the Austrian Film Museum legible along these lines. Single images are isolated from the cinematographic flow in order to scrutinize their inscribed cognitive potential. For Walter Benjamin, history disintegrates into images and not stories. Cityscapes is a search along the tracks of these images.
Cityscapes