The glove experience continues. For almost two months I used a shop at Recyclart, a Brussels art center. During my time at the shop, I gathered almost 500 lost gloves, with the help of many people, mostly fellow artists. It is not a bad number, given that the winter was really soft here, with only two really cold weeks. Most people only took their gloves from the shrank during this cold period and it was after the harsh-cold period that they started losing them.

I had drawn a storyboard for a gloves stop-motion movie, to be filmed in the nightly streets of Brussels. I thought it would be filmed within a few weeks but of course, it took much longer. I had to gather a small team, they were not always available, there were a lot of preparations like administration – getting parked cars off some streets, getting permissions to film (made easy by the Brussels Film Office) –  a big lot of finding tools, solutions and DIY for the filmset. The timing stretched a lot, and I am convinced that my naivity in this matter helped; if I had known it would take so long, I might have been less ambitious.

Most important in the shootings was my alliance with Brussels-based French experimental filmmaker Pascal Baes, who did the photography but also a great deal of mentorship about the analysis of movement, the use of pixilation etc.

So it has been a long nightly winter of shooting out in the cold, with basic equipment and many gloves. It was pretty adventurous and quite a  ‘primitive’ way of working, starting from found materials – the gloves. It became clear that my view on the city is quite tactile, looking at materials, touching them by means of the gloves’ fingers, finding the hazardous and avoiding the man-made messages that always try to capture our eye, like neon-signs and billboards.

The short movie still needs editing, sound and distribution, all of this might take a few months more.

I posted a short test-scene on Vimeo, awaiting the movie you can check that one out.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33272881[/vimeo]