LaborBerlin is an artist-run film lab open to everyone interested in analogue film practice, embracing an experimental & DIY approach to moving image production.

We have started a crowdfunding campaign, aiming to buy professional film processing and printing equipment from Film16, a lab near Cologne, that has recently closed its doors forever.

www.igg.me/at/filmaintdead

This is a decisive step towards our artistic autonomy (and of anyone interested in joining our collective), and it will ensure the future of analogue film culture.

"An immediate form of creating image and sound, a play on the possibilities offered by the film projectors, a use of mechanical machines in performance, discover what you can do with multiple projectors running simultaneously.

Performances with multiple projectors offer artist-filmmakers the opportunity to expand their spectrum of lumino-pictorical techniques. With modified 16mm projectors, conventional tools become personal instruments for transforming images loops of pure black and white into immersive perceptual phenomenons. Abstract forms and strobe pulsing on the screen slowly transform when adding additional projectors, overlays creating strange halos, bizarre 3D expansions and contractions. When more projectors are added, there occurs an intense sensory overload of light, sound and color."

As the first exhibition dedicated to experimental Swiss cinema, Film Implosion! sheds light on a little known aspect of art history in Switzerland. It presents a wide panorama of genre practices within the medium of cinema more specifically, but also video work, from the 1960ʼs to today. Through formal interventions directly on the celluloid, various in-situ installations, unconventional documentaries, political, feminist, animated, and fiction films, all these artists challenged the traditional codes of cinema.

For the past four years, and with the help of the SNF (Swiss National Fund), researchers François Bovier, Adeena Mey, Fred Truniger, and Thomas Schärer have been investigating experimental cinema in Switzerland. From this considerable excavating and mapping work, stems Fri Artʼs proposal for the firstever exhibition on this subject.   For the most part unseen, some 70 artworks, in digital or 16-mm format and signed by artists ranging from Fredi M. Murer, Dieter Meier, Carole Roussopoulos, Dieter Roth, HHK Schoenherr, Hannes Schüpbach, or Peter Stämpfli will be shown. The exhibition will also include video works, installations, and para-filmic objects spanning 50 years of radical creativity.