Festen

video, loop, 8’52” (2025)

Festen, based on a few second long segment from the first Dogme film, Thomas Vinterberg’s 1988 film of the same title, is a repetitive reconstruction of a memory-like fragment. A compulsive and imperfect reenactment of a captured moment in an abstract virtual space. A modelled, dreamlike state that leaves realism behind, in which enclosing membranes begin to dissolve, allowing previously impenetrable materials, objects, and perspectives to merge into one another. And the environment, in its detachment from reality, can rearrange itself around alternative optical and physical laws—becoming in ways, more real.

Video stills: