Accentuating the effects of space, light and structure, glass has become an architectural staple that encourages transparency and visibility throughout a variety of landscapes. After its role in the last century's call to a radical new architecture and urban life, glass architecture is today more ubiquitous than ever.
Seven choreographers work tirelessly to both question and embrace their chosen form, producing work that celebrates the strange, startling and poetic beauty of dance and performance. Curated by Gia Kourlas. Narrated by the choreographers.
"Post Ductility: Metals in Architecture and Structural Engineering" presents a series of detailed lectures during which the past, present and future of metal is discussed. Speakers such as José Rafael Moneo, Mabel Wilson and Steven Holl bring forth examples of the material's merit and methodical use over the past two centuries. The engineerical history addressed during the conference highlights the developmental and aesthetical reliance designers have consistently felt towards metal as a material. Citing its form, structure and construction, the lecturers analyze the material's anatomy, tracking its adaptation and growth within the architectural world.
"Permanent Change" looks at the history and development of plastic within the architectural world. Capturing both a series of lectures and a panel with prominent names such as Steven Holl, Beatriz Colomina and Werner Sobek, this documentation observes detailed examples and lively debates regarding the popularization of plastic as a construction material. Addressing a number of contributing factors including design, engineering and form, the participants of the conference present a wide range of theories, analyses and predictions pertaining to plastics as an architectural material.
Meier guides the viewer on a retrospective of his white buildings, from private houses of the 1960s to the Frankfurt and Atlanta Museums of the 1980s--all variations on his trademark spatial and planar treatment. His influences from Corbusier, Wright, Mies, and Baroque Germany are shown. Clients and colleagues offer opinions.
Ed Ruscha made his very first art in his native Oklahoma, but soon became attracted to Los Angeles . Curator Margit Rowell has examined his extensive body of work and created a brilliant exhibition of his seldom seen drawings. Rowell visits Ruscha in his studio, looking at new paintings with the artist, discussing his progress over the decades and asking him to comment on the many milestones in his large retrospective exhibition at MoCA in Los Angeles.
In 1969, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped 2.5 kilometers of coast and cliffs up to 26 metres along the coast of Little Bay, in Southeast Sydney, Australia.
In this endearing tale of friendship, animals are helped by Bear to get ready for winter. But will they be awake long enough for him to tell his story?
The Pasta’ay, which means "the festival of the legendary little people," is a significant ritual held every other year in the Saisiat aborigine group in Taiwan. Every ten years, they hold the Great Ritual. This film focuses on the Great Ritual in 1986. It tries to convey the Saisiat people’s affection for and belief in the legendary little people. At the same time, the film brings into light Saisiat people’s ambivalence towards tourist invasion, and their dilemma of being caught between tradition and modernization. Structured by the Pasta’ay songs’ movements, the film breaks down to 15 chapters. It carefully juxtaposes the visual with the aural elements, which are conveyed in the conceptual dichotomy between “the real” and “the artificial.”
In the practice of overtone singing (called also bi-phonic singing), whose best-known examples can be found in Mongolia and with the Tuva people of Southern Siberia, a single person sings what the audience perceives as two voices at the same time: a low pitch with his vocal cords, and in addition, a high-pitched melody using harmonics (overtones) selected by modifying the volume of the mouth cavity. This documentary is not an ethnography filmed in location. It is partly an illustration of the results of former research, partly the very actual investigation on overtone singing carried out in Paris, in the Ethnomusicology Department of the Musée de l'Homme, during a workshop, during a concert of the Mongolian National Ensemble, and in the medical visualization department of a hospital.
Growing concern among young Aboriginal community leaders, particularly those in the Borroloola Men's Group, drew them to the idea of re-enacting a walk that hadn't occurred for almost thirty years. The Buwarrala-Journey is a traditional walk for the Garrwa, Yanyuwa, Mara and Gurdanji peoples of the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Practiced for generations as part of the initiation of young boys, the walk was re-enacted in 1988 and documented in the film, Buwarrala Agarriya - Journey East. Gadrian Jarwijalmar Hoosan was twelve years old then and was one of four boys or Daru – boys who were prepared for their initiation ceremony. As an adult he had become a mentor to younger men, and directed a new film to record the new re-enactment of the walk in late 2017. The walk involved over one hundred community members - children, their families, teachers and volunteers, who covered a distance of seventy kilometres in seven days.
Like many St. Lawrence Island legends, this story is set in Siberia where Chukchi, the Reindeer People, live. Pelaasi, an elder from Gambell, speaks Siberian Yupik. His mythical story, about a man who goes out in search of a reindeer thief is an ungipaghaq, a tale that has been passed down unchanged through generations and believed to be based in truth.
Kabelbel follows a group of villagers as they are taught the art of canoe making and seafaring by clan elders. Intergenerational differences and a sense of social change emerge along the way, along with a profound sense of cultural pride. Shot entirely on the remote island of Masahet in Papua New Guinea’s New Ireland Province, Kabelbel captures the daily rhythm of contemporary village life and reveals with great nuance the importance of custom and tradition in a changing world.
A healer on healing, medicine & religion...Filmed in the modern city of Caracas, capital of Venezuela, Uncle Poison is an intimate portrait of a traditional faith healer, set against the backdrop of his community's Easter celebrations. Every day, Benito Reyes receives people at his house looking for all sorts of cures. Through his own testimony, this documentary looks at the healer's role as mediator between the social, natural and spiritual worlds. Curing someone or harvesting medicinal leaves, he must first seek permission from the plants he uses and from a variety of Saints. Like some plants and spirits, Benito has the power to extract the sickness and spells from his patients. A conjunction of sacred and profane, celebrating and mourning, Easter provides a rare opportunity to look at traditional faith healing in a wider social and religious context.
Every year, in the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, the "sorrowful way" of Good Friday is recreated by a path of colored sawdust and flower petals. Along this road several hundred people take turns carrying a ponderous mahoganybier.
A Kentucky State Representative has proposed a bill to change the Christmas holiday’s name to something more inclusive. It is presented as the Holiday Bill, but if the bill passes and they do change the name, what will they call it? No one seems to know, just Anything BUT Christmas.
Dancing Grass captures the communal harvesting of teff among Tigreans of Northern Ethiopia. Teff, an ancient indigenous grain, is central to the livelihood of smallholder farmers and may be called the 'cereal core' of Ethiopian national food identity. A local elder provides the commentary for the sequence of events that unfold in the homestead, fields and neighbourhood of the author's eldest brother and family: the cutting of the 'dancing grass'; the drying and stacking; the threshing and winnowing; then the sale of teff in the local market; off with a donkey to the mill; cooking enjera for family and guests; coffee drinking and blessing; and finally the Mesqel fire, an Orthodox Christian celebration at the end of the rainy season.
Since the 1980s, Kuchar has been creating brilliantly edited, hilarious, and often diaristic tapes made with dime-store props and not-so-special effects, using friends as actors and the "pageant that is life" for his studio. In this interview, Kuchar, in a generous, gregarious mood despite the Manhattan summer humidity, discusses his life and the full range of his work from the early collaborative films to his most recent tapes. Conversational anecdotes, frank and witty, provide insight into Kuchar's working methods, as well as the work itself and its reception in various quarters.