A roving micro-cinema.

10-17 September 2015 - pdome.org

The Situated Cinema Project; in-camera was a portable micro-cinema curated by Melanie Wilmink for Pleasure Dome’s 25th anniversary. Created by Halifax-based filmmaker Solomon Nagler with architects Thomas Evans and Jonathan Mandeville of passage studio and fabricated by Hollis + Morris (Toronto) the structure features pilgrimage (16mm, 4 min. looped, 2015) — an experimental film created by Nagler and his artistic collaborator Alexandre Larose. The project was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.

From September 10th—17th, the Situated Cinema traveled to three Toronto locations: King Street West as part of the Toronto International Film Festival®, Spadina Rd. in front of 8-11 Gallery and Shaw St. in front of Artscape Youngplace. As it traveled, the architectural structure of the cinema intervened in the city, creating unexpected situations where chance encounters and dislocated spaces forged new relationships between the spectatorial body and the urban landscape. Inseparable from its context, the Situated Cinema Project;in-camera explored the intersections of film and architecture through a rejection of conventional cinematic representation,reinventing the cinema space as temporary and mobile.

Featuring the film: "Pilgrimage” (2015) by Solomon Nagler & Alexandre Larose

Drawing on issues of memory, decay, palimpsest and the rubbing together of archive, fiction and situations, pilgrimage was constructed from found strips of 8mm amateur footage that the artists gleaned together during a residency in Sydney, Australia. The original footage—a tourist’s voyeuristic, filmed impressions of a pilgrimage in a crowded urban space, where the faithful painfully stumble before the entrance of a temple—was reworked using an optical printer and other hand-made techniques. It is presented as a 16mm loop in the Situated Cinema, which is particularly resonant, as the ephemerality of this analogue, mobile cinema reframes the presence of the spectators; watching while watched in an experimental architecture and in urban space.

Read more about the Situated Cinema Project; in camera in the program guide.