TRA [2024]

Single-channel digital video | 00:05:42 | Colour | Stereo | 1.85:1 ​

Co-created with Cathy Lee Crane

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TRA is an ode to Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. TRA synthesizes the narrative of his film Teorema (1968) by highlighting its interstitial moments and, exposing its subtextual currents.

 

The act of running that appears throughout the film is isolated and deployed to expose the film’s subtextual currents. This editing strategy of isolating selected moments is inspired by some of Pasolini’s ideas about filmmaking as a means of engaging the social and the political. Through editing, new pathways can be traced through, and between, images. The word ‘tra’ in Italian means ‘between’ and generally implies a spatial or temporal distance. It can also describe something moving ‘through’ something else, as well as something ‘in’ or ‘within’ time. These concepts underpin TRA’s aim for more speculative, revised and open narrative structures.

 

Pasolini proposes a concept of cinematic montage that equates spatial and temporal relationships created by splicing with a ‘ritmema’ (a rhythm-unit). These splices are not just technical cuts but also significant junctures for the potential iteration of subjectivities. 

 

                "Instead of organizing itself simply as a succession, a film ‘fishes’ continuously in the deep, in the matrix that is the world of objects ... The editor attaches shots to                 each other with ‘splices’ [producing] a ‘meaningful nonexistent’. It is in this incalculably minimal fraction of time (the interval produced at the cut point) that we                       should calculate the ‘negative durations,’ that is, those which do not exist, either as audiovisual material representation or as mathematical or rhythmic                                   abstraction. In the convention of the infinitesimal duration of a splice an even more infinitesimal real duration can take place; conversely, instead, an immense                       duration can take place – a life, a century, a millennium." 

 

                Pier Paolo Pasolini Theory of Splices (1971)

 

What is particularly resonant is Pasolini’s notion of ‘negative durations’ where time is made to trace something that is not yet visible. Consequently, time is excerpted, compressed, extended, looped, frozen, etc., as ways of creating space for something that might not yet exist. These durational experiences are often also linked to human movement, such as the running in TRA which mark time through the body, but not necessarily in a linear fashion.

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SHOWN

Pasolini: Durations, Casa Italiana - Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, New York, US (2025)  

​Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2025)

Traverse Vidéo – Rencontres Internationales, Toulouse, France (2025)

 

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