Richard Kraft

Psalms at the End of the World is an ongoing suite of films. Each film is constructed through a layering of fragments. The result is akin to “what Dante describes at the end of “Paradiso” when all the pages and all the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil fly through the air and are gathered into one single book, a chaos of knowledge forming itself into a coherence” as William Kentridge writes. At the same time, it is also related to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in which the certainty of a single, shared language is replaced by cacophony, a sea of language in which no singular meaning or narrative can be discerned. The images I choose to work with are easily recognizable, often, things we encounter daily. I always think about how each clip will combine with others, what kind of admixture they will form. There is a kind of magic in this, an alchemy even. What begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated film clips is transmuted in the collage, exploding into new constellations.

Psalms at the End of the World is an ongoing suite of films. Each film is constructed through a layering of fragments. The result is akin to “what Dante describes at the end of “Paradiso” when all the pages and all the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil fly through the air and are gathered into one single book, a chaos of knowledge forming itself into a coherence” as William Kentridge writes. At the same time, it is also related to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in which the certainty of a single, shared language is replaced by cacophony, a sea of language in which no singular meaning or narrative can be discerned. The images I choose to work with are easily recognizable, often, things we encounter daily. I always think about how each clip will combine with others, what kind of admixture they will form. There is a kind of magic in this, an alchemy even. What begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated film clips is transmuted in the collage, exploding into new constellations.

Psalms at the End of the World is an ongoing suite of films. Each film is constructed through a layering of fragments. The result is akin to “what Dante describes at the end of “Paradiso” when all the pages and all the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil fly through the air and are gathered into one single book, a chaos of knowledge forming itself into a coherence” as William Kentridge writes. At the same time, it is also related to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in which the certainty of a single, shared language is replaced by cacophony, a sea of language in which no singular meaning or narrative can be discerned. The images I choose to work with are easily recognizable, often, things we encounter daily. I always think about how each clip will combine with others, what kind of admixture they will form. There is a kind of magic in this, an alchemy even. What begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated film clips is transmuted in the collage, exploding into new constellations.