Trebuchet presents a premiere of the new film Destilacija [RMZ-24] by Sz. Berlin ± Panic – an ongoing A/V collaboration between Istria-based Sz. Berlin and the London-based film-maker Panic. Their videos have been shown in exhibitions at Burren College of Art and DKC Lamparna.
Destilacija was first shown at DKC Lamparna, Labin in December 2022. It re-engineers and re-imagines salvaged 1960s rail blueprints as the schematics of a future that is simultaneously lost and recovered, just as every rail terminus is always a point of beginning as well as ending, and of departure as well as arrival. The film shows us the vast space of the rail depot in which these documents and a train sat fading into history. These are accompanied by an hypnotic soundtrack, created using image sonification software. Photos of the original documents and of the new composite exhibition images derived from them were fed into the software and modified, generating the sonic component of the film. Blending location footage filmed one winter morning with the imagery derived from the schematics, the result is a 10-minute audiovisual requiem for a lost art and for lost futures. It is the final part of “Trilogy of Decay / Trilogija Raspadanja” – an alchemical A/V response to abandoned industrial sites in Istria and Rijeka. In the films and their soundtracks, a power station, a coal separator and a rail depot are fleetingly re-animated.
Separacija [PLM-22]
The works transform these sites from dead industrial powerhouses to newly un-dead post-industrial powerhouses. Each carries its own host of memories of the three ruling systems that created them: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fascist Italy and Socialist Yugoslavia. In their derelict, looted state, these sites have become terrible to many, and many would prefer them to disappear entirely, yet much can be salvaged from them – fragments, atmospheres, sounds and visions for the new times in which they find themselves and in which these projects are made. The titles of the trilogy – Separation – Degeneration – Distillation reflect the metaphorical and physical processes that shape these immense spaces.
Degeneracija [TEV-24]
Sz. Berlin ± Panic – Destilacija [RMZ-24]
The soundtrack to Destilacija [RZR-24] is released on May 22nd and the soundtrack will be available on bandcamp here.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
