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KICKSTARTER: “DEATH IN ARIZONA”
I’m a sucker for performance art projects dealing with things like solitude and personal healing. For example, there’s Sophie Calle’s famous Exquisite Pain, which documented her being dumped by a lover by phone at the tail end of a trip to Japan. Another piece involving Japanese hotel rooms, but with a different kind of pain, is Laurel Nakadate’s Love Hotel, currently on view at P.S. 1. In that piece, Nakadate checks into, alone, a series of Japanese sex hotels and photographs herself simulating the acts that go on there.
Slotted into this sub-genre is a new film project by Mexican filmmaker Tin Dirdamal, now in its final days on Kickstarter. He’s making a feature doc that was inspired by his own breakup with his Bolivian girlfriend. From the Kickstarter page:
I was in Bolivia shooting a film about the future of water. I met a woman. She captivated me in such a way that I moved in with her the night we met. It became the most liberating love I have ever had.
We lived together for 7 months. Then she left me. I was completely destroyed. I left Bolivia and years later, I returned to her empty apartment to try and free myself from this loss.
As her old apartment became my own, the windows began to transform before me. I picked up my camera and it liberated me. I documented the passage of time out these windows for over a year. This film attempts to reveal the significance of the insignificant, and how time takes its time. Like my neighbors, a family of 4 becoming 5 or the changing seasons with the destruction of one building and the construction of another.
Dirdamal has four days and about 14 grand to go. For $110 he’ll give you not only a hug at his premiere but also one of his unsent love letters. As for the title, Death in Arizona — it refers to his thoughts of suicide following the breakup. Check out the video below.
