Spintex
This film is a first collaboration between Ulf Langheinrich and Gina Czarnecki, building upon their individual careers and experience of working with dance, film, theatre, sound and installation. Filmed at an open air night club and other locations in the Ashanti region of Ghana, where Ulf Langheinrich lives, Spintex is based on a real-time transition from day to night.
In Accra, on the Equator, the transformation from bright sunlight into red, into blue, into the deepest black night lasts only fifteen minutes all year round. On Spintex Road, the air is dusty and humid, loaded with scent and stench. As night falls, the ambient sound shifts. The incessant calls of cicadas and the drone of mosquitoes join the wall of noise created by millions of insects and amphibians, the constant rumble of generators and distant traffic. Rival Christian churches broadcast hymns at competing volumes from speaker systems on their roofs, and female voices sing deeply in the Twi-Fante language.
At the dance in an old roofless shell by the beach, throbbing masses are engulfed in trance. The pulsing crowd forms one motion, one being; a rhythmic, sexual and elemental force as brutal as the cycles of the natural world around it. The imagery vibrates with movement and extreme details: a face, that look, the gesture… the joy and release.
In Spintex, Czarnecki and Langheinrich attempt to encapsulate the multiple, interconnected daily rhythms of physicality and mortality that resonate in the environment and the dance. The artists use processes of electronic recording, reproduction and disintegration to give the film rich digital surfaces. The images appear to dissolve within the noise and pixels of these surfaces, but emerge to striking effect before becoming highly textured again. The flickering pulse underlying these transformations is resounding, deep, immersive and total.
Gina Czarnecki and Ulf Langheinrich – Spintex
Produced by Forma. Funded by Capture
Ulf Langheinrich courtesy of Epidemic
Photos: Courtesy of the artists
