Golden Days (Remedios, Colombia 2012) Premiere

Golden Days (Remedios, Colombia 2012) is the new film by artists and filmmakers Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad that was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. It was inaugurated in Bogota on January 28 in a special screening at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, an event that included the presence of the film's creators.

The documentary was filmed in Remedios, a town in the Department of Antioquia, Colombia. There, gold mining has been for centuries the most important industry and the main source of income. The sequences juxtapose the surroundings against the miners, the landscape, everyday activities and the world of excavation.

The movement of images and music in the film is carefully presented as an internal and external meditation that generates a particular atmosphere as viewers embark in a journey through the life and surroundings of Remedios. Composed by the artists, the soundtrack relies on a variety of sound elements, such as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) in order to capture the "voices of the dead" and to generate sounds based on emission spectroscopy, a technique that allows us to listen to the physical matter contained in the mines, like metallic minerals.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad have collaborated on several projects for more than a decade. They have developed a method of their own that implies showing the rhythm of the documentary from the structure of a contemplative "still-life," that pauses in the images that show the architecture of the place and its surroundings. Golden Days (Remedios, Colombia 2012) is their fourth film. These two artists have explored themes associated with the natural resources in three earlier films that centered on coal, water and oil, as well as on the effects generated by the human manipulation of those elements: Hashima, Japan 2002; Al Qasr, Bahriyah Oasis, Egypt 2005; and Electra, Texas 2008.

Golden Days (Remedios, Colombia 2012) is part of extensive research focused on Colombia's past and present, its contemporary artistic scene and the country's rich legacy in the fields of the social sciences, philosophy, archeology and architecture.

Source: Department of Communications, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.