Djamila Grandits on bluish

Drifting through gloomy winter days, craving for touch, attempting to make sense of what is around, bodies slip through non spaces and grey cityscapes. Like knots in a network the intersections of parallel lives and perceptions become points of reference. Liminal states of being, spaces and layers of entanglements allow for small moments of collectivity and togetherness. A film like a mapping of a city and some of its dwellers in all their ambiguities. Ambiguities structuring a being in between. Moving whilst falling into it, falling apart, falling into place. Time bends and expands, as possible futurities and unspoken pasts are ever present.
Framed with generous precision and patience, offering space and guidance to closely observe minor movements and tactile shifts in materialities, we feel skins, waters, plant leaves, screens and concrete open up into vast spaces.
Bodies carrying themselves through cityscapes. Floating on the edge of a pool, contemplating over food, craving for soft touch and observing subjects of interest. Performative stagings of function and self, frequenting spaces structured by the social whilst feeling a dissonance complicating connection. Navigating transitions into new spaces, trying to understand what it means to arrive, deciphering codes and infrastructures, craving for connectivities whilst setting little anchors of stability and inscribing their own tones and choreographies into ever new environments. Latent tensions find temporary release in letting loose, feeling wind on skin or submerging into water. Screens – always close by, serve as protection and devices to connect, to search, to lose, to initiate, serve as technologies of movement and touch.

At times the everyday is swiftly ruptured by interventions opening space for the collaborative, when screens for the imaginaries of the larger collective serve as wormholes, warning us not to trust the linearity of time. Katrina Daschner’s deep sea jellyfish remind us of queer oceanities and hydro feminist utopias, “Perlenmeere” that in their fluidity and sensuality counter the heavy empty screen carried through the rigid non-place of a mall. A mall that Rebecca Merlic translates into a digital deep space, a glitchy rendering of a memory, an architecture to inhabit, a portal to escape to somewhere, for glitch bodies to occupy. Wise and witty in their royalty, Les Reines Prochaines glamorously set the tone for this film negotiating ambiguous states and scales of being, while never leaving our side. The auratic and dense performance by ZAK – underscored with a heart-wrenching hit by Lau Lukkarila and Benedikt Palier – amplifies a peak to evoke tears on and off screen, and when their voice asks us from the off to feel our toes wiggling in the wind while having us meditate over a pitch black screen we literally start to move in other fictions.
bluish operates on multiple strata, whereas one layer is structured by the logistics of navigating day to day life; bus rides, organizational burdens, snacks, negotiations of frame, others hint towards deeper realms of knowing and being, realms hard to control in their accessibility, sometimes overwhelmingly present, sometimes hard to grasp.
Spheres start to merge, to morph; when mothering a bunch of babykittens and hatching eggs in bags, when discussing invisible art, initiating impossible phone calls and leaning on unknown people, whilst continuous unexpected encounters with the queens become part of the daily.
Skillfully balancing unspoken edges of blue; adjusting and becoming, arriving and staying, drifting through unknown and familiar waters, ever accompanied by an awkwardness, as we get a lingering that something is off, something is blurry, something is glitch.
Choreographies structuring the ish, the maybe, the not yet, the hardly, the has been, the might be, and all the underestimated imaginaries, realms and waters that come along with this vast state of bluishness.