A system of analogue devices that are both a means of production and a set-up consisting of a self-produced projector an automated slide system and a lightbox
Menyunting Arsip / Editing the Archive. Resequencing the Tillema Collection is an experimental documentary film, produced by Paoletta Holst and Paolo Patelli during a series of workshops and exhibitions over the last couple of years. Staged through workshops and exhibitions it initiates a participatory kind of archival film-making.
It is an experimental documentary film, made and unmade through a series of collaborative workshops and exhibitions, each functioning as an editing/screening room. Using a custom-made analog projector, the participants worked on the archival images, composing visual sequences and voiceovers. For this project we specially designed and made a set of analogue tools needed for the production and the stage of the project.
Our task was to facilitate the interaction between the participants of these workshop and the visual material, that mainly consisted of photographic films.
Two main tools derived from this intent: first a projector to screen them largely and secondly a light box, to organise them.
The projector was made by assembling different components from the field of stage illumination and laser optics. As a result from an empirical approach we created a rail for the slides that could hold the sequence as a visual narration.
H.F. Tillema was a Dutch pharmacist, entrepreneur, self-taught ethnographer and photographer, lobbyist and advocate for hygienic standards in the colonies, who lived in Semarang, in the former Dutch East Indies, for twenty years of his life up until WWI. With several cholera epidemics in the background, he built the first purified water bottling factory in the Indies. This enterprise made him rich; it opened for him doors to exclusive industrialists’ clubs and local and national politics. Importantly, it directly supported his expeditions, observations and (self published) publications.
Detail of the lightbox and the collage of films, images and other materials: the result of the workshop was then organised as a sequence for the projector.
As part of Gudskul’s program for documenta fifteen, the collection of photographs produced and collected by Hendrik Freerk Tillema (1878-1952) during his time in the colonial Indonesia was reproduced in Jakarta, and made available to the contributors, who composed cinematic sequences by selecting, manipulating, editing and screening the materials, while providing the voice-overs.
Detail of how the sequence of images should be attached to the rail via plexiglas sheets.
The projector is designed in order to disassemble itself to fit into cases and be sent to Jakarta first, and Rotterdam afterwards.
The two separate analogue tools freshly made in our workshop near Treviso.
Alessandro Mason, Pietro Lora
Paolo Patelli, Paoletta Holst
Mirco Piccin / Fablab CfV
Alessandro Mason, Paoletta Holst