Jasper Rigole: Seven Types of Sea + Live music

Seven Types of Sea is a collaboration between filmmaker, visual artist and archivist Jasper Rigole and composer Thomas Smetryns. The music is a combination of pre-composed parts and various improvisation techniques.

The project is a film screening with live music, the blueprint for a film in the making. The footage comes from the IICADOM archive (The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories) founded by Rigole. This archive consists of an extensive collection of family films, mostly on 8mm and super8, found over the years at flea markets and sales halls. 

Seven Types of Sea starts from the observation that the sea plays a very central role in this archive, partly because the film material was mainly shot during holidays, where the sea is often an important destination. In addition, we can also note that the sea has a special attraction for many amateur filmmakers, which transcends the recreational aspect. Consequently, we get to see not only the typical days at the beach, but also some poetic interpretations of the sea in its other guises (the impetuous, the endless, the mysterious sea, …) 

The artistic starting point for this project is Rigole’s observation that in cataloging the images, he uses many different categories, archetypes and keywords in an attempt to name the images of the sea and to distinguish them from each other. In this way, an idiosyncratic system or a personal idiom emerges. The resulting taxonomic dizziness is the archivist’s true challenge. After all, isn’t every division absurd and don’t we always invoke arbitrary and hypothetical classifications? The poetic, creative drive with which the amateur creates his images is mirrored in the archivist’s cataloging gaze.

• Line up
  Thomas Smetryns: composition, tuning forks, zither, turntable
  Marieke Berendsen: violin
  Jacob Vanneste: percussion
  
  In the presence of Jasper Rigole