Antje Van Wichelen & Maxime Gids
Antje and Maxime are developing a small, handheld mechanical viewer for 16mm film loops. They take their inspiration mainly from the mechanism of the Cinématographe as it was developed by the Lumière brothers in 1895.
This machine was designed to be a camera, a film printer and a projector for 35 mm film. It traveled the world to make and project 1' films, 'discovering' the world. It holds many elements of the 19th Century spirit that brought along the image production, the anthropometric and exotic construction of clichés, that will be the topic of the first series of film loops to be on view in the viewers.
The design will be published. It is meant to be open and reproducable. This development has been commissioned by the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne, in the framework of the art campaign with the title HANDS. This art campaign invites nine artists to develop reproducible artworks meant to find their way into the publics hands and homes – in a time when touch has become a rare good. The prototypes, along with first series of reproducibles, will be exhibited in Cologne between July and December 2021.
BIO
Maxime Gids and Antje Van Wichelen are both members of the artist run filmlab LABOBxL and passionate about understanding and reinventing tools of celluloid cinema.
Maxime Gids
Maxime is a filmmaker who re-invents the wheel on a regular basis, in order to better understand how it works, to get to grips with it, to have fun. Sometimes, in the middle of the journey, the process of re-invention forks and gives rise to new tools, new perspectives, new works.
Antje Van Wichelen works with experimental 16mm film to unlock and edit colonial photographic material. Her project 21C/19C _ Procedures for Anthropometric Image Reversal investigates the collective memory of colonial classification systems. She developed the works Noisy Images and The Recognition Machine in a framework that now became the collective Troubled Archives. Troubled Archives' works have been exhibited in Everything Passes except the Past (Goethe Institut, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo - Turin 2020) and are selected for the 14th Biënnale de Dakar (2020 - postponed to 2022). They published in Roots & Routes. (https://www.roots-routes.org/troubled-archives-the-story-of-how-an-individual-artistic-research-into-archives-becomes-a-collective-and-at-times-community-driven-project/)
