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 a place of rupture—an attempt to come to terms with the sudden death of my father by returning to the physical and emotional architecture of our shared past. Grief often resists articulation, so I turned to the language of images, textures, and digital fragments. Combining animation, photogrammetry, and live-action footage, I tried not to reconstruct what happened, but rather to explore the traces left behind—those spectral remains that linger in space, in objects, in digitized memory.

The film is less a narrative than a landscape: a topology of absence and failed reconstruction. I was drawn to the tension between photography and animation—the still and the moving, the captured and the created—as a way to speak about loss. Photogrammetry, with its glitches and gaps, became a metaphor for mourning: it allows you to almost touch the past, but never entirely hold it. The more I tried to preserve, the more things dissolved—shapes deform, edges flicker, familiar rooms blur into dissonant space.

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.

Rather than offering clarity, the film embraces distortion. The animations flicker like thoughts half-remembered, or dreams slipping through your fingers. I didn’t set out to make a film that explains grief, but one that sits with it—quietly, awkwardly, and sometimes painfully. As some reviewers have beautifully articulated, the result is a kind of digital elegy: a house with no doors or windows, inhabited by ghosts made of green light and pixel dust.

At its core, this is a deeply personal document—but not a closed one. My hope is that viewers find their own reflection in the fragments; that the abstraction leaves room for resonance. Grief, after all, is a shared solitude. And cinema—especially at the edge where it pushes into contemporary art—can offer a space to process, to feel, to relate, to remember together.

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
Video Library / Rencontres International Paris/Berlin
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

© Field Collective & LUCA School of Arts
2023