Vostok, Faretheewell
Andy Graydon
Thursday, February 24, 20:00
Vostok, Faretheewell is Andy Graydon's most recent Super-8 film project. The 36-minute film explores the city of Berlin, and uses it as a lens to examine various modes of suspension, of incompleteness, of being in-between.
The film follows Yukitomo, a Japanese designer who, while touristing in Berlin, is unexpectedly called by a Korean movie company to create the 3D computer model for a space ship (named the Vostok) in a Science Fiction film. We follow Yukitomo as he takes photos not of the great vistas of Berlin, but close-ups of surface details and materials, which he uses to "skin" the model of his space ship.
The film is about visions (artistic, political, architectural) as forms of power, and about the de-formations and re-formations they endure on encountering the material world. Graydon traces this in Yukitomo's struggle to design his model, and in a parallel narrative about the history of Berlin itself, as written in its architectural environments. It is a history of power and conflicting ideas of order, each leaving overlapping traces in the city's material reality.
Berlin is seen as a world in the process of formation and re-formation, defined by provisional measures, aborted completions, attempts at erasure, constant renewals, and shifting cycles of competing interests. The Vostok becomes a model not only for a mutating space ship in a fantastical film, but also for a city in the constant process of using its materials of the present to orchestrate perhaps not something new, but something else entirely.