Flatform is a collective artist based in Milan and Berlin. Films by Flatform have been featured in several film festivals including, among others, Quinzaine des Realisateurs de Cannes, Venice Intl. Film Festival, IFFR in Rotterdam, BFI Film Festival in London, LOOP in Barcelona, Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, IFF in Melbourne. Works by Flatform have been shown in many museums and institutions including, among others, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, MAXXI Museum in Rome, Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, MSU-Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Museu da Imagem e do Som in San Paolo. Selected Awards: Go Shorts in Nijmegen 2020 and 2016; Nashville Intl Film Festival, 2016; Jihlava Intl Doc Film Festival 2015; Lago Film festival 2010 in Lago; 25FPS 2009 in Zagreb; Screen Festival 2008 in Oslo.

Flatform. A time of the times

We always talk about time: as soon as movement is involved or the camera starts recording, everything becomes a question of time and light. Of a moment. Of a moment in which we suddenly have the illusion of physically perceiving time, which has been displaced from its line, to repeat itself folded over and over again before the eyes of the beholder.

The gaze is another matter that cannot be avoided, and Flatform’s pieces make us look very carefully, a gaze that until not so long ago was not at all part of the paradigm. The gaze in this case is both ambitious and careful.

With what appears to be simplicity without being so, in Flatform’s pieces we discover things we did not expect, as it turns out that we are not looking at what is there, or more precisely, we realise that what is there is not only many more things than we think, but that it also has delicate relations with memory. And this is one of the most important things that this programme brings us closer to: memory is immense and collective. The time of the tree, of the person, the time of the rain, the time of the house, the time of the wind and the sea, of the street lamps, the time of the light. Time passes through everything and everyone in different and strange ways, very difficult to understand, which is stimulating.

The images in Flatform have a poetry that is born in the constant interest in paying attention to these other times that finally intersect our lives, and in giving them a place or visible form in the marvellous illusion that is the moving image. The limelight is shared and distributed equally, so that it becomes spatial, collective, multitemporal, the human spectator disappearing a little, though not entirely.

In Storia di un albero the protagonist is an immense Walloon oak tree, a non-human organism whose existence lasts for centuries, whose body, branching out to form a leafy crown, grows and develops without rest in the face of inclemencies and events that it transforms, falling apart less quickly than the rest of us. Flatform builds the piece around its enormous protagonist, walking through its branches, inhabited by owls and other species, as a way of bringing us closer to an incredible life, using as a resource a series of human and non-human voices, which speak to us in different languages of different situations, as if emanating from the tree that at some point in time absorbed them.

Acknowledging the limelight of non-human beings and elements, the Italian collective places us in a position in which our way of understanding, our gaze, are no more than particular perceptions, which can bring us only poorly close to everything that escapes us, and many things do escape us. Este programa nos ayuda a entenderlo con piezas como Quello che verrà è solo una promessa, Movimenti di un tempo impossibile o Non si può nulla contro il vento.

The fact that a certain fantasy is used, embracing and enhancing it through the possibilities of the audiovisual medium, generates, in a way, a fictional atmosphere that facilitates identification and tenderness towards that which we said we normally shun and which exists between the times, memories and gazes of those of us who live together on earth, between our routines (57.600 secondi di notte e luce invisibili) and our shelters (Quantum).

It is evident that the paradigm is changing, and that the human animal is no longer at the centre, or that everything points to the fact that the idea of a centre is at least questionable, with the rhizome and the network gaining a new protagonism. Without romanticism or grand discourses, Flatform shows us through the pieces that make up this focus, that just looking in a different way is already a way of thinking in a time when all times matter.

Noa Castro Lema