20fps is a new series for sound and experimental film hosted by 20 Seconds Magazine at Morphine Raum, in Berlin.

The series is conceived as a space for the splicing of experiments in sound, performance art and film, employing unconventional techniques in order to communicate social, political and artistic narratives.

20fps No.2:
UNTITLED #1 (SUN VISION) film by Barbara Sternberg 40’ | 2019 | silent / sound performance by sir o sir field recordings, sound objects, hydrophones, prepared piano
There were two initial impulses for the film: Turner’s almost-not-there paintings of light (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) and the swirling, spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr. Sun-light-film-
“Untitled #1” is a film of liminal thresholds, borders, amorphous states—sky, clouds, fog, lake, snow. A film in motion—camera gestures and emulsion activity. People and seasons pass in the daily repetitive cycles, repetitions and reprises and beginnings again—sameness amidst the fleeting. Blurring, merging, dissolving boundaries—the world as it is forming and disappearing… Not nothing, everything.

LOVE ME film by Barbara Sternberg 6’ | 2014 | silent
Using only text-on-screen, “Love Me” distills the emotions of an earlier film, “Beating”—emotions which conflict, confuse, are difficult to reconcile. The texts “speak” unsaid and unsayable thoughts, impolitic or just impolite. Suppressed exclamations from past injustices, hurts, angers surface, interrupting, erupting, demanding attention.

FILM NEGATIVO/POSITIVO film by Federica Foglia 15’ | 2023
“Film Negativo/Positivo” is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart—on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and the other negative.
An abstract remediation occurs—female bodies are dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body slowly merges with the body of insects and flowers.
The film uses organic material, melted together with gelatine emulsion, first liquified then re-solidified, to produce a crystallized visual allegory of interspecies feminine bodies.

INNESTI BIANCHI E NERI film by Federica Foglia 7’ | 2022
In horticulture, “grafting” is the joining together of plant parts by means of tissue regeneration. Grafting is the act of placing a portion of one plant (bud or scion) into or on a stem, root, or branch of another (stock) in such a way that a union will be formed and the partners will continue to grow.
Following a similar approach, several 8mm and 16mm home movies (from the 1930s to the 1970s) are assembled into a hand-made collage reflecting on the personal and cultural process of “becoming” a woman. The original found footage, mainly portraying women intent in their domestic lives, has been collected obsessively from eBay auctions, then remediated through a number of artisanal techniques: celluloid decay in soil and water, emulsion scratching, painting on film, digital manipulation and finally, emulsion lifting. The latter by soaking the film in a bath, slowly removing the image from its base, and placing it on another, a celluloid graft.

BYE BYE NOW film by Louise Bourque 10’ | 2022
When people wave hello to the person behind the camera in home movies they seem aware of waving hello to a future viewer. Yet, upon viewing, the very gesture (re)presents a recurring good-bye to a fleeting moment. This film is an homage to the man behind the camera in these personal 8mm family archives, my father, who left me this heritage beyond mortality in the traces of past lives. — Louise Bourque

FISSURES film by Louise Bourque 3’ | 1999
A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, Bourque literally distorted the personal home movie images appearing on the film plane through various manipulations in the process of doing her own low-tech contact printing. The images warp and fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like re-surfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solarized as well as hand-coloured through toning.

Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life-questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists’ film and video exhibition group.

Federica Foglia is a transnational visual artist and writer. Her practice revolves around tactile filmmaking, recycled cinema, amateur filmmaking, archives, ecofeminism, and materialist cinema. She works within the domestic space to remediate found-footage movies, via a sculptural approach she intervenes directly on the celluloid body. Her work engages with the physical qualities of the film medium and the politics of fragmented aesthetics.

Louise Bourque is an Acadian French Canadian filmmaker now living in Montreal. Her “œuvre is an irreducible totality in which personal and family secrets hide behind layers of photochemical emulsion. A repetition of motifs springing from home movies and other found footage permeates her films, creating an obsessive universe that is visceral and oneiric at the same time. Through this process, figures from the filmmaker’s personal life transform into leitmotifs, gradually losing their individuality and becoming archetypes. Her ‘going back home,’ returning to the self, corresponds to destruction and renewal. Death and birth, fertility and decomposition. These oppositions run through Bourque’s work and find an echo in her practice; she creates out of images that are ‘dead’ (unused, discarded, forgotten) and buried (in the garden of the familial house). Her engagement with the film material is direct and physical, letting unpredictable chemical processes act on the surface of the film strip, so that new colors and forms can emerge from the deeper layers of the image.