Osmosis

In 1947, Marie Tinguely leaves her homeland to go work in a hospital for the Swiss mission in the South African bush. After her death, the films shot over 25 years as a missionary, as well as some of the letters she wrote are found in a family apartment. I decide to explore them.

HIC&NUNC is a film projected in 16mm on a wax screen. The images and sounds offer an immersive experience in an artist's studio, creating a subjective portrait that explores gestures, materials, and the concept of reproduction.

Seeming as though they’ve been there for ever, marked by the two moraines along the snowslide, the glacier is enormous. Looking majestic, timeless in a monochrome landscape, it is imposing, but turns out to be vulnerable too. The objects it spits out: empty tins, the skeletal remains of an airplane, are the manifestation of man’s fleeting passage, and bear witness to its continued and irreversible thawing. Yet it still resists.

An immersion in the desert with a Bolex and some questions… How do we perceive “nature”? Is it a “thing” to which we, humans, are external? Or are we all part of a mesh without center or periphery? Can film help us to perceive nature not as a thing, but as a living entity endowed with sensitivity and agency?

Amid landscapes of confused memories, Doctor L, a missionary in southern Africa, recounts his journeys and adventures in the bush, intensive evangelisation efforts and surgical operations at the end of the 19th century. 150 years later, four inhabitants of the region send him a letter in the form of sound capsules, evoking a past whose traces can still be keenly felt.