canvas-family

Production company Mr. Beam and TivoliVredenburg were looking for creatives to fill in a video work for their concept Canvas, a 150 m2 surface over 3 floors of the general central space in the music temple. The theme they addressed was What family really means to you.

Canvas programmer Julius Ponten explains: “In times of major, complicated conflicts, we look for support and positivity nearby to stay afloat. The relationships with the people close to you become even more important. These can be your biological relatives, but family can also represent your community or a group of like-minded people.”

Immediately upon reading the pitch, I thought of a specific film format, Super 8. Since the 2000s, everyone’s childhood has been recorded entirely digitally, but my youth goes back a bit further and is partly on analogue Super 8 film. Seeing these images again, but also the film format itself, always brings back the warm family feeling of that time. I think the presence of a super 8 camera in our household also sparked my first interest in film and animation, I made figures and Lego blocks move via single frame recordings. You sent the fully shot roll and then you had to wait until it was sent back developed.

For my part in the bigger picture I tried to see the entire wall as a kind of projector. I dived into my own archive and made a montage that takes you chronologically, from black and white to color, along different moments from my own life and that of others. In addition to Super 8 I also used 16mm film found footage of about 100 years old. These images show families on ice skates and on vacation in the mountains, not much different from how families interact with each other today. The whole thing is supplemented with contemporary effects edited into a dynamic clip of 1 minute. Part of the wall becomes the slot of an old projector where the film is fed in to project the image.