Miniature Minutes by Olicía

Miniature Minutes (Out of the Blue)
Olicía & Lisa Hoffmann

„Miniature Minutes“ is the penultimate work within Olicía’s “Out of the Blue” cycle. It is the result of their collaboration with the experimental film maker Lisa Hoffmann, based in Berlin. It has taken on the form of a series of seven songs and corresponding films, each of exactly one minute duration. The artists aimed for a spontaneous “playing in the sandbox”-approach for this, a very immediate and raw form that opens up new ways of composition and visualization. The ideas on display, nonetheless, are a quite fundamental with each individual work representing one thought or position, such as intimacy (Under White Sheets), the collision of external and internal drives and motivations (Bälle), worlds within worlds (Microscope), or autonomy in interpersonal relationships (Demandé).

“One More Minute asks what I would do if there were literally only one more minute left. I'd try to stay calm and live through the moment with all my senses - safe in the arms of a loved one.”, Fama explains one of song’s thought process. Anna regards the idea of total honesty in an interpersonal relationship in “Under White Sheets” as “an encounter in which two people - protected and sheltered under the covers – can say everything to each other that they might not be able to say in the ‘real world’ and in daylight.”

The corresponding videos by Lisa Hoffmann visit different miniature worlds like an insect: a bed room, a snow globe, a tiny snail, a computer screen and its pixels. Also formally, the works are about limitations: one shots, one-minute-duration, and analogue effects, applying different lenses and magnification glasses. “Thinking about scale is interesting,” Lisa Hoffmann, “because it quickly enables us to leave our human-centered perspective. What is one minute? One minute in film terms is 60 times 24 images. One minute, in snail terms, probably feels different. And without a clock, each minute feels different: When you are in a hurry vs. when you are bored. The moving images can stretch a minute, or slow it down. Is there a lot of action, are there repeating images? Also space stretches and compresses. Optical tools, such as cameras and lenses, can help to zoom in or out.” She describes her process as “very experimental at first until a choreography emerges from it. Then, the precision work begins.” The seven films, she arrives at, have a logical order, they are interconnected through certain details and play with recurring motifs, just like the songs.

it rings, buzzes & booms when two women have more than two voices, you want to burst when loops, synthesizers, basslines and percussion take over when outfits match the texture of sound your eyes and ears fuse when orchestrated voices enwrap you like velvet and gold it clashes, hums & dances

Anna-Lucia Rupp - voc, fx, guit, pocketpno, qarqaba

Fama M’Boup - voc, fx, kora, dr pad, asalato, qarqaba

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