Leipzig Calling | Annotations on Architecture, Media and Life

Date & Time: Sat, 24th June @2:00PM-8:30PM
Location: Sàn Art
Millenium Masteri,
Units B.16 & B.17
132 Ben Van Don, Ward 6, District 4,
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Language: English

As part of the city residency exchange with LIA, Artist-in-residence Maix Mayer opened up doors for a continuous, two-part screening and open studio programme. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet the artist in an informal setting, learn about his research-based practice, and hear about the ways he engages science, fiction, urban architecture, and media experiments to reflect on how we experience time, space, and history.

Part 1 comprised select media works by Maix representing the methodological and contextual frameworks of his practice. Part 2 was a screening of the urban film-essay ‘Alphaville_MD’ – Grand Prize winner at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in 2012 – that marks the beginning of Maix’s current cycle of works, ‘barosphere’.

Cover image courtesy of the artist.

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Screening list:
Looping presentations:
– ‘surface-1’, 2001, 3’
– ‘water world (Notation 1)’, 2023, 2’

Part 1 (75min):

1. ‘surface-DD’, 1998/2022, 4’
2. ‘space patrol’, 2012/14, 28’ (split screen demo, excerpt)
3. ‘telelift’, 2011, 58’ (excerpt)
4. ‘canyon’, 2006, 8’
5. ‘shell territories’, 2017 – ongoing, 36’ (excerpt)
6. ‘epilog/shell territories’, 2017 – ongoing, 18’ (excerpt)
7. ‘A2’, 2016, 9’
8. ‘barosphere 1 (trailer)’, 2016/23, 4’

Part 2 (28min):

– ‘Alphaville-MD’, 2011, 28’ – a film-essay set in the German city Magdeburg. The title refers to Jean-Luc Godard’s classic movie “Alphaville,” a mix of science fiction and film noir. Set in Paris of 1965, the movie makes the point that the future is often already conceivable in the present. In ‘Alphaville-MD’, architecture simultaneously acts as protagonist, setting and projection screen. Composed of various space-time modules, the film engages numerous models, ideals and visions for the city of Magdeburg to quote the phases of modernism, and the discrepancies in its ideas, forms, and functions.

** This event was supported in part by the City of Leipzig Office for International Affairs, Deutsch-Vietnamesisches Hause e.V., and Leipziger Wasserwerke.