Using personal correspondence and some passages from Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s The Head of Goliath, as well as recreations with paper models and minor acts of architectural preservation, Incomplete Disappearance presents a series of simulations through which an identity crisis is (temporarily) avoided.
Vienna, 2019 – the end of an era. The smoking ban in public places means that a part of Kaffeehaus culture has disappeared. Of all moments, this is the one that Angeliki chooses to buy an apartment with help from her interior designer friend, Carmen. Angeliki seems to have something against all of them: either the parquet floors creak, the tiles are the wrong colour or she is bothered by the proximity to a restaurant. How will she ever find a new home in this environment? Carmen feels like she’s talking to a brick wall. Moreover, she simply cannot understand why Angeliki is refusing to part with her money. A Journey from Vienna to Malaga, via salt flats overcast by mysterious shadows. A homage to the Austrian capital and the bygone splendour in ordinary things.
F begins to follow two young anarchists who sporty usurp abandoned commercial storefronts and apartments. These three strangers will become closer after subtle acts of trespassing and sporadic forays into civil disobedience. The longing for exile and the fantasy that a promising future is somewhere else contaminates F. The city is immersed in an eternal holding pattern, becoming into a singular artifact, as melancholy as uncanny.
Gaston Solnicki plays himself in this cinematic tribute to his friend Hans Hurch.
A one-minute short made for BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema)
Argentina Buenos Aires, 1968. The boundaries between everyday life and art are blurry. While increasing political and institutional violence, artists try to transform their ideas into realities. The dictatorship plans to stay in power for a century with the self-assigned mission of “morally healing” Argentina’s spirit. Among broken artists, emerging pop stars, poets with metallic voices, and collectors running shady deals, Prat, a young and morally ambiguous upstart, is a new face in the art scene. Is he a service provider, an artist, or just another outcast? He meets Omar, an artist he admires, and Maria, a mystical anarchist hiding her oligarch lineage. The trio wanders through nightclubs, spontaneous fashion shows, psycho-magical group therapy sessions, and dinners in the rooms of bitter political figures. The backdrop is a collapse that seems imminent.
An unclassifiable film that swerves between the realms of conceptualism, comedy, sound art, every-day anecdote and a grim accounting of our “society of control”. Departing from the weird experience of being a “language strategist” in a modern work-place, it sketches out multiple systems of words, symbols, diagrams, gestures and ex-changes – only to deconstruct them, and constantly return us to the realm of “pure signifiers”, the noise that exist before any identifiable meaning, the lines and colours that precede a recognisable image. In a world of logos designed to emotionally manipulate us, Segal values our perceptual freedom.
