Seaside 2008
Seaside by Nelly Ben Hayoun from nelly ben hayoun on Vimeo.
Seaside was done in a really experimental way. The brief was about producing aesthetic images which best ‘illustrates’ one of your earlier projects. I decided to work on one of my previous project called ‘Keep in touch with dead people’.
However, I reconsidered the object produced for this project, and tried to develop this area of ritual around contacting dead people. What really intrigues me is the personal experience of making a ritual. As it’s done by you, the aim of it is also really personal and might not be understood by others. This doesn’t really matter, you do it because you need to do it because you feel that it’s the good way to make it, and that is very intimate.
So I came up with this image of a man wrapped in foil sitting on an odd rough chair, probably
made by him. You don’t know what it’s used for, but you understand through the film that it’s something, which works around water and fire.
He’s practicing his ritual with a blue light all around, his feet inside two buckets with the legs of the chair. A woman swimming, appears on the screen as a parallel movie. “Who is she?” is left to your imagination.
It was really important to get to this area, where you know something is happening that you can’t identify but something unusual. Also I wanted that you feel all the tension of this ritual that I try to introduce through the aesthetic of the images and the sound (with the help of Tim Olden).