Fuji

MOVIE #1,688 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 05.31.24 The final two Friday Film Dump posts are for short art/installation works that I saw at Philadelphia's Wonderspaces gallery recently. Alongside Meow Wolf, this is part of a growing trend of interactive art spaces that are popping up in and around cities (although Wonderspaces is functionally much more akin to a traditional gallery than the latter). This one — Joanie Lemercier’s Fuji — is more art installation than work of cinema, but I still found the ~15-minute warranted inclusion on this site. It was really a magical experience: part meditation and part optical illusion — I’m still not 100% sure exactly how this came together (you can see a snippet of it here). It’s essentially just projected light onto a large-scale, hand-drawn landscape sketched directly on the two walls of the room. It manages to be simple and complex at the same time, which is a beautiful metaphor for the volcano it’s meant to depict.

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⫷ MOVIE #1,687 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,689 ⫸

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“Fuji” is part of Lemercier‘s ongoing artwork series on volcanoes. It combines a large scale hand drawn landscape depicting the Fujiyama, augmented by a layer of projected light. The abstract narratives are inspired by the legend of Kaguya Hime, a folk-tale from the 10th-century and a key element in Japanese culture. It gives an imaginary and poetic vision of this story in an immersive environment.The piece was premièred at the projection mapping exhibition in Takamatsu, in the art islands district of Japan. It was released on August 24, 2013.