DIVE IN Cinema: Heidrun Holzfeind,the time is now.

For DIVE IN Cinema, LUX Scotland presents an online screening of Heidrun Holzfiends’ the time is now. followed by Relentless, a newly commissioned audio response to Holzfeild’s film by Glasgow based artist, Susannah Stark.

The time is now. taps a seam of environmentalism, sustainability, anti-nuclear and anti-war activism which ran through the Japanese shamanic improvisation duo IRO’s (Toshio and Shizuko Orimo) more than 40 years of collaboration. Holzfeind’s film captures the energy and care which sustained a lifetime of activism. To quote an interview with the duo, ​‘This is urgent because the world is in danger.’ Susannah Starks’s new audio work, Relentless, riffs off and chimes with IRO’s origins in free jazz and punk while exploring different dimensions of understanding ​‘softness’ in relation to the human voice and manners of speech.

About the work:

The time is now. is a film about the Japanese shamanic improvisation duo IRO (Toshio and Shizuko Orimo).

IRO’s music combines influences from punk, 1970s Free Jazz, ethnic music, ancient Shinto rituals, and indigenous ceremonies. Their musical experimentation goes hand in hand with their activist involvement in the peace and anti-nuclear movement and a free-spirited way of life that vehemently rejects commercialism in all its forms.

For Holzfeind’s film project the duo performed in various locations of the Inter-University Seminar House in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, a unique example of modern architecture designed in 1964 by Japanese architect and thinker Takamasa Yosizaka. Yosizaka’s ideas about the relationship between humans, nature and architecture, individuality and community, sustainability and peace, as well as his critique of Western civilization in many respects concur with the couple’s animist and pantheist weltanschauung.

Holzfeind juxtaposes IRO’s performances at the Seminar House recorded in the fall of 2018 with their last punk concert in 1987 and found footage of protest movements. The visual juxtapositions and acoustic superimpositions yield an astonishing synthetic impression of their artistic collaboration which spans more than four decades.

Relentless is a new audio composition formed out of vocal experimentation, drum loops and distorted percussion, improvised piano, and guitar (played by Adam Lewis Jacob). This work is part of an ongoing exploration into different dimensions of understanding ​‘softness’ in relation to the human voice and manners of speech.

DIVE IN Cinema is a donation-based online season programmed by a cohort of Scottish independent exhibitors and film festivals.

DIVE IN Cinema is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and Lottery funding from the BFI.

Heidrun Holzfeind is an Austrian born artist and filmmaker.Over many years, she has created an oeuvre in film, photography, and sculpture that has insistently addressed questions of the documentary mode in general, and the social function of architecture and alternative ways of life that renounce consumerism in particular. Based on extensive research and realized with poetic flair, her works probe the interrelations between society and identity, between individual histories and the political narratives of the present.

Susannah Stark lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated from the Royal college of art in 2016 with an MA in Fine Art: Print, and from Grays school of Art in 2011 with a BA in Printmaking. Recent exhibitions and performances include Time Together, ​‘Pre-Ramble’ at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2020.