ABOUT
24.09.25
Staffordshire St Project Space
How can film itself act as both witness and interpreter of what we recall? And how might the fragile materials and technologies of cinema mirror the fragility of memory itself?
Taken together, these films invite us to reflect on how memory is formed, lost, and reshaped, both on screen and in our own lives.
Programme:
10 Megabytes of Memory
Markus Maicher, 2021, 2 mins
What is the meaning of "memory" in the digital age? For humans, memory conjures subjective images of past events; for computers, it denotes an objective capacity to store information. The film compresses ten human years into ten megabytes of binary data, employing an aesthetics of the small file format, a counter-strategy against the ever-increasing resolution, bitrate, and environmental costs of digital images.
Fovéa
Pierre-Manuel Lemarchand & Emmanuel Piton, 2014, 8' 54 mins
In the blink of an eye, a body confronts the memory of a place that may never have existed. Space wavers. Memory is perforated.
Strawberries in the Summertime
Jennifer Reeves, 2013, 15' 52 mins
A two-and-a-half-year-old boy revels in all things tiny and vast around a farm. His father shares his delight in climbing, animals, and bugs. A mother observes with a camera, then departs into flowing fields and forest. A fleeting landscape glows with the delicate tensions between distance and intimacy, wonder and pain, in the raising of a young life. Black-and-white positive, negative, and solarised images toned in copper and blue - alongside a soundscape of nature, song, and the boy's budding voice - evoke the texture of memory.
Toyokoro
Maki Satake, 2000-2012, 13’40 mins
After her family leaves their hometown of Toyokoro, the filmmaker turns to an archive of VHS footage to examine and preserve the sites of cherished family memories. Returning to these places, she records herself re-engaging with the landscapes of her formative years.
Ever ø
Justin Brown, 2022, 5’58 mins
Fragments of joy flicker against a backdrop that does not belong to them. Faces and gestures dissolve into other landscapes, as if memory has been exposed twice. The film drifts between tenderness and intrusion, suggesting how fleeting moments of closeness are never free from the shadows pressing in around them.
Mem_ry Fr_gm_nts
Pierce Warnecke, 2014, 7’46 mins
Memory is a recording of the senses, with the mind as its medium. When recalled, it plays back imperfectly, never as exact as the original experience. This makes memory a volatile storage medium, subject to transience: the gradual degradation that comes with the passage of time. Digital audio and video recordings, by contrast, are theoretically immune to such decay. Memory Fragments explores recordings as memories, taking samples of sound, video, and found objects from a physical space and subjecting them to an imagined process of transience, slowly eroding the digital traces until they disappear.