News  ·  02 | 08 | 2018

Mack Attack

The Grand Bizarre - Signs of Life

Are you ready for a Mack attack? An expert in stop-motion animation who approaches her material with a playful, handmade collage aesthetic, Jodie Mack has made her name with a series of 16mm-shot experimental shorts that present themselves as studies of domestic and recycled materials, most recently last year in the Pardi di domani competition with Wasteland No. 1 – Ardent, Verdant. The “characters” of her feature-length debut The Grand Bizarre are jiving and juking textiles – with this knowledge, the title, naturally, is a pun on “bazaar” – and the marketplace being referred to is the global economy, as in her film Mack explores the technological development of fabric production and consumption alongside systems of visual and spoken language. She takes the viewer on a magical, musical, mystery trip in two meanings of the word: first, a worldwide voyage from the US to places like India and Holland, sometimes also represented through a collage of maps; and, second, the psychedelic, as she transforms the material elements of this wide, wide, world, through cinema, into something unquestionably extraordinary. The Grand Bizarre screens with Tulapop Saenjaroen’s video piece A Room with a Coconut View in which a foreign guest to a seaside town in Thailand goes on a wild tour of his own.

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