The Pharmacological Practice of Dr. Vanapuneberg (~5:00 mins) is a collaborative project created with Yvette Granata. Together, we worked with early Dutch ethnographic films depicting "the Cannibal Isles" and other South Pacific locations, re-cutting, re-focusing, and reconstructing the footage to craft an entirely new narrative. Using techniques akin to those employed by the original filmmakers, we engaged in a process of historical montage, zooming in on overlooked details and exploring the folds within these archival materials. This project became a way to question and reshape historical narratives, opening them to alternative interpretations and hidden possibilities.

In 2013, The “Medical Experimental” project unlatched a small drawer of The EYE “Dutch Film Institute’s” archive in order to research and survey on “Films once produced to discipline human bodies within the institutional framework of Western medicine, to educate and transmit medical knowledge now emerge within a larger framework of storytelling, art, truth and falsification.” For this project, a re-reading on Aby Warburg’s “A Lecture On The Serpent Ritual”, and Philippe-Alain Michaud reading on the afore mentioned, in his book: “Aby Warburg And The Image In Motion”, opened-up new venues to rethink the possibilities of how narratives contained in archives could be revisited and intervened today.

Narratives are constructions, a piecing together of frames, therefore, they can also be de-constructed and reconstructed, contextualized and re-contextualized in a new construction, as a possibility to expose aspects of their originally intended meanings. These conditions imply an altering in the relationships and the processes between the images, bringing an emphasis towards the importance on the use of imagery as language. Warburg’s lecture deals with the symbolic signification on the relation image-language, and consequently brings attention to the abstract operation of symbols in specific cultural contexts. Inexhaustible, throughout Michaud’s text we are presented with the notion of movement, composition or re-composition-ing and the juxtaposing of elements in order to construct and produce new meanings. In order to articulate these concepts in one coherent narrative, we propose utilizing the idea of the ‘moving picture’ as a metaphorical space where matters and thoughts could be joint and composed in one single place, in this case, the frame as a conceptual space of constant movement. 

*Work presented at: The EYE “Dutch Film Institute’s” archive; “Medical Experimentation” Presented by the Rietveld Academie and the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s Media Studies department.