audiovisual artist & filmmaker
ciucioflorinda@gmail.com
Instagram
My audiovisual practice reflects on life in an overstimulated world.
I create slow, quiet moments that offer pauses in time, to invite deeper reflections on how we perceive and experience our environments and process information. In a world that pushes for constant speed, productivity and attention, exploring what it is to slow down feels to me like a poetic act of resistance.
I often draw inspiration from research on environmental psychology, landscape theory, and mental health to explore how our attention and nervous systems are shaped by the constant flow of daily stimuli and our fading connection to nature.
With a background in film directing, I’m very much influenced by the cinematic experience where viewers sit in a dark room and time feels suspended and controlled. This feeling of immersion and time-awareness shapes how I create work to both calm and unsettle, inviting people not just to look or listen, but to notice themselves: how they wait, how they crave, how they connect.
Alongside this, my documentary practice is based on poetical observations that are rooted in sensorial experience of environments. Working with real-time observation, my films emphasize tactility and presence over explanation, using landscape, movement and everyday gestures to carry meaning. Experiences of migration, belonging, friendship and time are allowed to unfold gradually, through slowness, repetition, and metaphor.
CV
FLORINDA CIUCIOTHE VESSEL
THE VESSEL
2021, 1H loop, 3-channel video installation
in the frame of an artist residency at Het Bos Art center, Antwerp
selected project as a laureate in Artcontest 2021
project support by BREEDBEELD
DESCRIPTION
‘THE VESSEL’ features three video projections paired with a pink-noise soundscape. Visitors enter a pitch-dark black-box room. The projections consist of selected fragments of old Super 8 films shot by my maternal grandparents, inland shipmen traveling in the 1970s.
The video projections are selected fragments of old Super 8 film material from my grandparents, who were inland shipmen between Holland, Belgium and Germany throughout the 70’s. The fragments contain passing landscapes, moving water and snapshots of life on deck.
The three projections are one and the same loop, but they all start at a different time, thus creating three different projections at any given moment, but still familiar to the audience. The images are projected at eye level, in a size in resemblance of a window. This way the viewer can imagine standing in the cabin of the ship, but because of the dark surroundings, the nostalgic images and the meditative soundscape more like in a dreamlike state, than trying to mimic reality.
Pink noise mimics sound signals of biological systems through the cyclical sounds of nature, such as rain, wind, rustling leaves or as in this case: water. Although this noise is purely synthesized, as soon as it gets combined with the video images situated on the ship, showing water in almost every frame, the brain automatically makes us believe we are listening to real water.
There are different layers of waves in the soundscape, varying in speed and intensity, and sometimes a far away ship/foghorn is added into the mix, supporting the overall hypnotic ambience of the installation. Seagull sounds are added to reinforce the nostalgic feeling and are an almost classic sound to stir a memory.
Pink noise has the quality to filter out all other sounds around us, helping people fall asleep or keep them longer in a deep state of relaxation. Combining these qualities with the imagery in a blackbox, a meditative exercise is created for visitors.
Thus the intention is for the viewer to be immersed in his or her inner world of memories through this meditation, meticulously crafted out of other’s memories.