I am very interested in starting with the relationship between the real and the archetypal dimension in your creative process. Does Krakatoa arise from an impulse towards symbolic storytelling which, through field research, finds real points of reference in which to take shape (a person, a landscape), or is it the observation of the real that triggers a process of transfiguration towards the archetype? Perhaps it is a circular process, in which the two planes run in parallel, feeding off one another.
It is actually both ways, I need always to have a full research on the themes of my films before immersing myself in the field. First comes archive and then comes field, but after that it all mixes up, encounters become oracles that invoke ideas that are in the process and also ideas or concepts impose a vision of the field that allows archetypal visions or modes that emerge, like a new reality, then for some reasons ideas go through a sort of dismembrance or deposition that conveys and gets rids of superficial ideas or layers that blur or complicate the meaning. My goal is always to go to the deepest and most meaningful idea and archetype, the one that holds the highest number of reflections in a kaleidoscopic vision of the world and the myths we have created through generations. That is why I was obsessed with the mythical eruption of 1883 and how much it is embedded in our unconscious and also how its name, Krakatoa, evokes all sorts of images that come from mouth to mouth throughout generations and ancestral tales told through time.
The dimension of sound is a central element in the film’s experience and plays an intimate part in this transfiguration of reality. I would like to ask you to share with us the work you did with Nicolas Becker to construct this soundscape, from field recordings to post-production.
The beginning of the film is the image and the understanding of the eruption of 1883 as the most streaking cry of the earth !
I wanted to try to make this perceptible and to convey it through sound, all the more so because I had already begun to do so in my previous film, Cemetery, without being fully aware of it. The film forms part of a trilogy centred on sound, with Krakatoa constituting its second instalment. Whereas Cemetery explored other species and adopted an approach more closely rooted in biophony, Krakatoa is a more geophonic and telluric film.
I began working with Nicolas Becker on a sound installation created for the Shanghai Biennale, which was already based on the project’s initial research. For that installation, we gathered materials and seismic data from the most recent volcanic eruptions. Drawing on these sources, we reconstructed a model of the 1883 eruption, using a historical graph produced at the time from recordings made by a gasometer. That sound model became a background for the work in the film.
All that seismic backbone became the starting and hidden layer of sound from where we started working. Then we basically reconstructed all sounds and produced new ones as a sort of alchemical conversion of everything we had from location sound to our field recordings and to the archive of Nicolas which is very extended and vast… Each part of the film needed a sort of frequency range and needed to experiment with possible audio phenomena related to its meaning.
The goal was to activate the brain in different ways and produce this telluric connection and sort of mineral merging and transformation that we wanted to achieve.
The experience of colour and light plays a central role in the film’s narrative development. How did you conceive the composition of image and colour to mark the transformations undergone by the protagonist and the landscape throughout the film?
I wanted to have a film that converts and changes itself throughout the different parts.
Each one celebrates different genres and influences, from classic documentary to disaster film, from adventure films of the 50-60s to experimental film. Each part would have a different atmosphere and color code, but would also participate in the narration by echoing the ways that the eruption eruption changed our view of the world for nearly 6 months, creating what we call the Krakatoa sunsets, a sort of earth cinema experience concept that really fascinated me.
And that was the inspiration and origin of Edward Munch’s painting The Scream one of the greatest paintings, which started a sort of sensorial expressionism that would change the history of art and that would at the same time express the angst and fear of a new era.
The film’s final sequence is an extremely intense sensory experience in the cinema, inducing an altered physical state in the audience. This choice echoes your previous works, such as Cemetery, in which we witnessed a long sequence of ghostly images appearing in the darkness. I find this exploration of the exhibition space as a device for altering perception very interesting; could you tell us about how you conceived the sensory dimension in the various forms of Krakatoa (film, installation, screening with live music performance)?
I wanted the film to extend and continue the quality of the cinematic experience of Cemetery. I wanted to expand the research by introducing the visual element as a way to recreate the ultimate inner journey, where the spectator would make not only a symbolic journey to the center of the earth but ultimately to his inner mind.
I wanted this journey to take the spectator again in a similar manner to Cemetery, where I tried to create that sort of merging between species and recreate the possibility of a new awakening…becoming mineral or merging mind and earth.
My work is becoming more and more an experiment of physiology and how we can expand our sensorial connection to the world and our environment. I wanted to add the vibrational dimension in the installation format and try to add that possibility of exchanging territory with the spectator, where he could lie down and receive information sensorially though his skin and bones… all that telluric and seismic information creating a further connection.
When we premiered the film in Rotterdam, we had the opportunity to present it in its different iterations and formats, the theatrical format projected through a DCP, but also in its installation format with a central retroprojected screen, allowing the two sides to be viewable. This installation allowed for a more open version with different editing and extra images to allow a more open and less narrative format than the film version.
The installation lasted during the whole festival, allowing everyone to go, after watching the film in the cinema halls, to the installation space at the port hangar that hosted the expanded cinema projects of the festival. The light and strobo dimension was worked and orchestrated with the film in space. For the opening of the installation we also managed to introduce the live concert version of the project with Nicolas Becker and Armand Lesecq doing the soundtrack live, a sort of live foley and spatialisation of the work, while I was editing the film live…a really amazing experience!
It was great to be able to present the project and the research in all their dimensions.
Interviewed by Margot Mecca
