This film is the first collaboration between Ulf Langheinrich and Gina Czarnecki, building upon their individual careers and experience of working with dance, film, theatre, sound and installation. 

 

In Spintex, Czarnecki and Langheinrich attempt to encapsulate the multiple, interconnected daily rhythms of physicality and mortality that resonate in the surrounding environment and the dance, based on a real-time transition from day to night.

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The artists use processes of electronic recording, reproduction and disintegration to give the film rich digital surfaces. The images appear to dissolve within the noise and pixels of these surfaces, emerging with striking effect, before becoming highly textured again. The flickering pulse underlying these transformations is resounding, deep, immersive and total.

 

In Accra, on the Equator, the transformation from bright sunlight into red, into blue, into the deepest black night lasts only fifteen minutes all year round. On Spintex Road, the air is dusty and humid, loaded with scent and stench. As night falls, the ambient sound shifts. 

 

The incessant calls of cicadas and the drone of mosquitoes join the wall of noise created by millions of insects and amphibians, the constant rumble of generators and distant traffic. Rival Christian churches broadcast hymns at competing volumes from speaker systems on their roofs, and female voices sing deeply in the Twi-Fante language.

 

Filmed at an open-air night club in the Ashanti region of Ghana, the dance takes place in an old roofless shell by the beach, filled with throbbing masses, engulfed in a trance. The pulsing crowd forms one motion, one being; a rhythmic, sexual and elemental force as brutal as the cycles of the natural world around it. The imagery vibrates with movement and momentary details: a face, that look, a gesture… 

 

Joy and release.