Borderlands
A cinematic essay by Marielle Nitoslawska examining hybrid identities and film as transcultural memory practice. Combining archival footage, oral histories, music, landscape, and first-person commentary, this project recalls the marginalized histories of women in the Belarusian borderlands, the place of Nitoslawska’s family roots. Supported through a SSHRC-Insight grant.
Deux temps-trois mouvements
A short deploying 9,000 wintertime stills taken by Marielle Nitoslawska from her desk window to explore weather, ecology, and quotidian temporality in the static and moving image. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s idea of “profane illumination,” the winter window reveals uncanny dimensions of perception and the resonance of embodied experience. Supported through an FRQSC Recherche-création / Équipe grant.
Nitoslawska’s research focuses on forms of experimental nonfiction, cinematography, the aesthetics of embodied affect, landscape, corporeality and cultural hybridity. She is Concordia University Research Chair for Experimental Non-Fiction Practices in the Arts, Director of the Fabrique-mondes research group, and PI of Borderlands.
Solitude forestière: Le silence de la Manicouagan
An interactive, web-based nonfiction project by Guylaine Dionne that gives voice to the men and women workers who built Quebec’s Manicaguan hydroelectric dam in the 1950s-60s. Dionne uses letters, photographs, home movies, interviews, and place-based sound to examine the social, industrial, and geographic histories that coalesce around the dam, which is nestled in a meteorite crater on the ancestral territory of the Innu peoples. Supported through an FRQSC Recherche-création / Équipe grant.
Dionne’s research in experimental documentary, sensory ethnography, and multi-platform screens examines and womens’ & labour histories. She is a member of Fabrique-mondes research group.
The Western Gate
A lyrical short investigating text-image relations by Michael Yaroshevsky. Yaroshevsky experiments with in-camera optical structuring and coordination. 35mm film emulsion uncovers new semantic configurations of textual and formal signifiers. Superimpositions interweave disparate fields using textural/spatial/aleatory structuring methods, which are temporally/rhythmically controlled. Supported through an FRQSC Recherche-création / Équipe grant.
Yaroshevsky’s research interests include image-text relations, essay and lyrical film forms, perceptual processes, cinematography and screen-aesthetics. He is a member of Fabrique-mondes research group.
The York Theatre: New Frontiers of Networked Cinema
A site-specific, interactive augmented reality (AR) project by Jean-Claude Bustros about Québec’s cinematic history. The project agitates for a new cinematic form of critical spatial practice for the digital age. Expanding Tristan Thielmann’s notion of “digital deambulation,” the mobile app, allows users to unearth the cinematic ghosts that inhabit the site of the historic York Theater building complex (demolished in 1997), where Concordia’s EV building now stands. Supported through an FRQSC Recherche-création / Équipe grant.
Bustros’ research focuses on new forms of expanded and interactive cinema. His experiments with mobile and immersive transmedia explore the radical potential of spatialization, ubiquitous computing, reactivity, and moving image agency. He is a member of Fabrique-mondes research group and a collaborator with Borderlands.