Hôtel Beau Rivage presents the ambitious 11-chapter film The Bends by Andrew de Freitas embedded across a number of online platforms, including aqnb.
Through a variety of style and duration, the Auckland-born, Rio de Janeiro-based artist explores filmic fragmentation and complicates the notion of a cohesive whole through a project that totals one hundred minutes running time. Each segment is meant be to circulated online and viewed independently, in collaboration with Hôtel Beau Rivage and a number of other online platforms including x-temporary, RVNG Intl, I: Project Space and the personal Instagram accounts of his collaborators and supporters.
Hosted here is the fifth Chapter with it’s confusingly sequenced title ‘INTRO’ (watch below), presumably as a gesture toward this discombobulating project, produced by the artist himself along with his associates and recorded internationally between 2014 and 2016. Shooting locations include Canada, Germany, Brazil, Portugal, Morocco and the United states, where “a scuba-dive inside of a wandering camera-body, filming other bodies in motion” fluidly breaks with common linear narrative and film strategies, drifting from one context to the next. Moving between different ’emotive’ worlds, The Bends project also explores fragmentation and diversity within collaborative making, as well as a reflection on the promotion of the art.
In addition to its online circulation, the project has also taken form as an exhibition in Wiesbaden’s Nassauischer Kunstverein (2015) in collaboration with Samuel Walker, as well as four performative screenings (2015) across locations in Rio de Janeiro where “the audience was invited to walk from one screening to another, re-enacting the passage from each chapter to the next through their own physical movement, with performative interventions and additional contributions from other artists and collaborators.”
There is also website titled The Bends (2016) which was made in collaboration with Julian Garcia.**
