A Two Weeks Solari

Now this is one of the weirdest photos ever!
A 2 weeks solargraphy. Solargraphy?
Solargraphy is a technique in which a fixed pinhole camera is used to expose photographic paper for an extremely long amount of time (several weeks or months or even a year). It shows the path of the Sun across the sky. The paper doesn’t need to be developed – it would become totally black – the negative images appears on the paper by itself because the altered chemical grains in the emulsion are going crazy with this long exposure time and start to „burn“ the paper!
I had placed it in my English residency in May. You don’t really see any sun beams but a quite far away abandoned nuclear plant 😉
(contrast and inversed: Photoshop)

Prospect Cottage – Pinhole Photos

I made a bunch of pinhole photos with my new little favourite camera: the peppermint camera!
Put a piece of photo paper inside which I later developed in Caffenol. Result: a negative, took a phone photo of it and digitally flipped it over to a positive. I made about 20. Maybe a book?

Prospect Cottage

I was a lucky 2 weeks artist in residency end April until mid May!

I lived in Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. It was once the home of Derek Jarman, a British filmmaker, I’d say experimental, gay activist, and painter and all of all, a gardener. This cottage and the garden around became quite famous. He spent his last living years here … remember when Aids came up in the 80es and so so so many artists, gay artists, died away? He was one of them, died in 1994. 30 years ago. This cottage now belongs to a … read more here if you like!

What was I doing? Sitting on my favourite bench in the sun, dreaming a lot of intense dreams, making super 8 films and pinhole photos (for some reason this time my peppermint camera is better than my Illy!), collecting leaves and flowers, cooking a soup for developing.
2 weeks are short. 2 weeks are long.

A butterfly flutters around me, I say: “Come here, land on my hand, little butterfly!” and what does he do? Land on my hand and look at me! I look back and smile and feel very welcome here.

A Flock Of Flickers – 2 Done!

Did I tell you about the online zoom meeting / webinar think that I started in February?

“You love Super 8, you are at the very beginning and don’t know much / you are in the middle and are enchanted / you want to know everything about Caffenol and ecological developing, cameras and film stock / you have experience and specific questions … let’s connect!
We meet every last Sunday of the month!
I moderate and tell and show tricks and film examples … you have the opportunity to bring in your own topic / problem / question. I am there to help.”

Check my Blog!

We had 2 meetings already, you can watch 2 snippets! It was great and fun and very … connecting. On YouTube.

Flicker 1

Flicker 2

More Old Films: “Country Baby”

“Country Baby”: Silke on the countryside in the middle of flowers explaining the dangers of Wühlmäuse / voles and the pleasure of taking a break in the hammock.
Thanks to the Filmuniversität Potsdam-Babelsberg (and Benjamin who is writing his master about my films!!) … I have a few more freshly scanned films now online!! The old forgotten ones …
Country Baby, click here to watch it on Vimeo!

More Old Films: “Unfelle und Nachladen”

“Unfelle und Nachladen”: untranslatable German, partly nonsense, playing with words and letters.
Thanks to the Filmuniversität Potsdam-Babelsberg (and Benjamin who is writing his master about my films!!) … I have a few more freshly scanned films now online!! The old forgotten ones …
Unfelle und Nachladen, click here to watch it on Vimeo!

Old Films New Scans

Recently I had the opportunity to have several of my old almost forgotten super 8 films scanned! Very hi res and for free as part of a film studies research project. The sound is bad, taken from the ridiculously slim magnetic tape on the film … I will have to re-edit it.

Here comes the first film, a little poem in 2 words called “ABE”, from 1989 … click here!!

ORWO Worms

I’m browsing through old workshop films … There will be a little exhibition at Dresden Schmalfilmtage / Small Format Days in March and they are celebrating 60 years of super 8 hoorayyy!!! Showing a variety of films including some of my workshop group films (I gave 2-days-workshops at their festival in 5 consecutive years from 2009).
Some snippets here!