Under the Bridge

Video, color, 9.37min

Language carries in itself the dialectics of open and closed, outside and inside. Geometric opposition is stained with aggressivity. Formal opposition is incapable to remain calm.

An exercise in slow ontology and the poststructuralist proposal of a stopframe of space as a projection surface reflecting the duality of the being. Incapable of being completely autonomous or completely communal, the self manifests in a constant withdrawal towards the margins. Only in liminal spaces, suggests Bachelard in “Poetics of Space”, the being tests and reveals its consistency in relation to itself. The location of the (eponymous) video Under the Bridge is such a space: liminal and, at the same time, heterotopic. A ‘tram island’ located under a bridge, between road lanes. A place where the communal body (re)distributes between the open space of the street and the metal casket of the tram, randomly formed and reformed by drifting fragments that lack a coagulating agent. In such a space, the leading character imagines or remembers her co-protagonist, whom she encountered in a manner as random as her arrival there. On one side, the woman plays the empathy card and slips towards the hero complex. On the other, the man seems to ignore his ‘victim’ condition and behaves in a machistic manner. In the background, passerbyers act upon the situation just like the space of the location itself: generic, almost meaningless, but still daunting. The only catch is, none of this story is visible, but all of it relies on its placement there, on a ‘tram island’, under the bridge.

Camera: Dragoș Hanciu
Boom: Laurențiu Coțac
Sound mix: Alex Bălă
Commisioned by: Rokolectiv Festival 2021
With further support from: microFILM & VideoLink