Reflective Encounters

“‘Orphan film’ is an umbrella term that emerged in the 1990s among film archivists to identify moving image works abandoned by their owners or copyright holders, quite often due to a lack of commercial potential. Rootless and often unplaceable, these films lend their inherent ephemeral significance to Federica Foglia’s evocative collage film CURRENTS / Perpendicolare Avanti.

Foglia chemically processes film strips by hand using a technique called emulsion lifting. Discovered by chance and then refined by moving image artist Cécile Fontaine, emulsion layers (the photographic part of the film, which consists of dispersions of light-sensitive materials in a colloidal medium, usually gelatine) are coaxed off, delicately separated and then rearranged. Through this direct-on-film animation technique and extra-diegetic sound excerpts, Foglia conjures up stories of transnational migration and displacement, pointing to the artist’s own experience as an Italian immigrant living in Canada. Water ripples through the film via archive footage of Venetian scenes and anonymous home movies of people taking a dip and enjoying seaside activities, presenting migratory movements as a fluid, unstoppable, and beneficial factor in human history.”

— Ren Scateni