artifacts of you, artifacts of me.

Combining animation, live action and photogrammetry, this intensely personal document tackles with the universal subject of grief.

Director statement

artifacts of you, artifacts of me. emerged from coming to terms with the sudden death of my father by revisiting to the physical and emotional architecture of his death and our shared past. Combining animation, photogrammetry, and live-action footage, I tried to reconstruct what had happened, but in the end constructed a failed one that explored the traces left behind. I was drawn to the tension between photography and animation, the still and the moving, the memory of a past event and the present moment. Photogrammetry became a way to speak about loss, allowing to touch the past, but never entirely hold it. The more I tried to preserve, the more things dissolved. The film is a deeply personal document but not a closed one, less a narrative than an emotional field or landscape, a topology of absence.

In a conversation about the technology, Alexandra Crouwers metaphorically described photogrammetry as the mythical figure of Acheron—the boatman of the Styx, ferrying souls from the realm of the living to the underworld. The final image of the film was inspired by this comment and simultaneously refers to the Scheldt (la Schelda), the river near my family home that flows through the swampy landscape of Flanders. I didn’t set out to make a film that explains grief, but one that sits with it—quietly, awkwardly, and sometimes painfully. Rather, the film aims to embrace distortion over clarity, flickering thoughts half-remembered, dreams slipping through fingers, a digital elegy: a house with no doors or windows, green light and pixel dust.

“Humanity has always imagined the future as a journey toward a better, smoother life, something like a somehow utopian paradise on Earth. It’s been and still is a long way to go, especially when so many singularities find it challenging to match with each other in a world that extends to the infinite in its digital dimension and experimentation. What is left of humanity, then? Does it belong to memories of long-gone feelings? Should we imagine a cold future, in which human relationships are reduced to a minimum, where the machine is privileged for a smoother dialogue or stuffed with artifacts that fill the need for sweetness and serenity? Are we able to imagine a future when we find it difficult to remember, to stimulate used feelings?"

- Gabriel V. Soucheyre, on the VIDEOFORMES Program at CYFEST16

Credits

Creative direction: Mahsaa Abasi & Michiel Van Wambeke
Camera: Tuur Oosterlinck
Light: Lucas De Cock
Music & sound design: Ismaël Iken
Surround mix: Vince De Leenheer
Photogrammetry assistents: Meron Janssens, Florian Giroul, Tamara Abdul Khalek

Awards

FABRICA AWARD / Ibrida Festival delle arti intermediali
Best Experimental Film / Ghent International Short Film Festival

Written and directed by Brecht De Cock
Produced by Brecht De Cock in co-production with LUCA School of Arts, Sint-Lukas Brussels
Supported by deAuteurs

Part of Video Library Rencontre International Paris/Berlin 2023

© Field Collective & LUCA School of Arts
2023