Kilvo
“A remote, barren, almost unfriendly landscape: Kilvo in Lapland was the inspiration for Radian´s music, and even the accompanying visuals by Michaela Grill play with the bare countryside´s resistance to its depiction.
A fourfold split screen shows views of this place in a kaleidoscope of animated digital postcards. The normal associationsævisions of majestic, or at least marketable, beauty, of exotic or untouched wildernessæare consistently undermined in KILVO. Instead of showing an idyll, the landscape is reduced to the greatest degree possible. Lines and contours are stripped from the background of black, white and gray tones. The viewer cannot be sure what is being shown, or implied. For brief moments fleeting images appear, then change or are lost. Faithful reproductions are not the important thing here, but the digital transformation of a real landscape into an abstract pattern, translation into a completely different visual form which at the same time conforms to this landscape.
For all its reduction and structural austerity Kilvo also has a playful aspect. The movement in the screen sections follows the music´s spasmodic rhythm and its modulation. The sounds and images are combined in an entertaining and complex game with structures, and with musical and visual synchronisms.
In the end everyone can invent Kilvo for themselves. In their reservation and simultaneous openness the sounds and images offer a projection screen for the viewers´ mental images, for the search for their own imaginary landscape.”
[Barbara Pichler]www.sixpackfilm.com
