Lauri Astala’s Sketch for the Last Map (2022, in featured image) was awarded for the Best Video Art at Flight Film Festival, held in Genova, Italy, from October 28 – November 1 2022. The jury gave the award “for making the spectator experience one-of-a-kind hypnotic travel where time and space merge in overlay generating a new geometry.”

In the core of Sketch for the Last Map, overlapping translucent indoor and outdoor spaces relate to the multi-layered and placeless world in our digital era. Many faces of cities – private spaces, less “public” realities, cleared, restricted or fenced off out of sight – stay excluded from maps and the stream of images. The work was shot in several cities in Belgium, South Korea, India, France, Turkey and Uruguay.

The programme of Flight Film Festival included several films by AV-arkki’s artists:

In Jenni Toikka’s Prelude Op. 28 No. 2, during a single long shot, we see two people taking turns playing the piano and listening alternately. The piece is the same on both times – Preludi Op. 28 No. 2 by Chopin – but when the performer changes, the interpretation of the song changes along with the perspective from which the song and its performance are viewed.

In Matti Harju’s El Centro, young Anon discovers the digital, binary root of everything during a school trip to New York and comes to a surprising conclusion. An associative and abstractly structured video about the boundaries of communication in the hinterland between analog and digital – a study at gaps between looking and understanding. 

Azar Saiyar’s My Home (2022) goes through various archives, both personal and public, from different times and from different moments of life. It tries to remember. These ingredients do not build a single coherent narrative, one pure argument, a continuously developing story of growth, nor a piece that is solely a person’s own.

Joel Karppanen’s A Nature Documentary (2021) is an essay film about simulated nature, forest animals, nature photographers and national parks, that combines ecocriticism and image critique, archival and modern day footage, natural soundscape and electronic birds. 

Flight – Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, October 28 – November 1 2022, Genova, Italy

More information: Flight FF

AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible.