With static takes and an electronic soundtrack by composer Carsten Nicolai that creates an alienating and surreal atmosphere, the Swedish photographer Mikael Olsson and the artist Andreas Roth show abandoned row houses from Kosta, Sweden. Bruno Mathsson, famous as a designer of furniture, originally constructed these structures in 1955 for the employees of a Kosta glass company, using only raw materials from the region, but they have been abandoned since 1988.
In spite of the very quiet interior and exterior takes, the film develops a very subliminal mood. The contemplative images give the viewer the sensation that he/she is looking at a location touched by an ecological catastrophe: the rooms are deserted, but strangely there are no traces of devastation; nothing moves but the falling rain, the grass moved by the wind, the foliage outside the windows and light itself.
The sounds of Carsten Nicolai remind one of insect chirping and, in some way, they sound toxic. Coloured tableaus are composed in juxtaposition to the images, and combined with Nicolai’s pure, sine-wave tones, that represent the architectonic structure of the houses, bring us from the surrealistic into the abstract.
The film had its premiere on April 2006 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. DOKU.ARTS screens “Kosta 3:30” in combination with “Sound on Life” on Saturday, September 22nd , 2007, at 2:30 p.m at the Academy of Arts / Hanseatenweg.