It’s not a Place, It’s a Shape
by Piibe Kolka
synopsis
Andy and Piibe were friends, two Estonians in New York, two generations apart, with shared interest in performance, video and dance. Andy was a woodworker and had also been one of the founders of The Kitchen art space in 1970s. Piibe is a filmmaker and artist and she wanted to create something together with Andy.
Now Andy has passed away but Piibe is still attempting to do something together. By relating to Andy’s archives of early video and performance trials at The Kitchen and her own images and experiences of New York City she is building a performance-film that asks about presence and disappearance, the captured and the fleeting, memories in movements and the shapes we each make during the brief time of the body on earth.
biography
Piibe Kolka is an artist, filmmaker and film worker with a background in anthropology. She works with video, sound, movement and writing, presenting work in screenings, installations and participatory performances. She is interested in artists’ moving image as a personal inquiry into the bodily, temporal and rhythmic aspects of social realities, currently she is working at the intersection of performance and cinema. She has studied anthropology at Tallinn University in Estonia and filmmaking at The New School in New York. Most recent works include collaborative installations in Estonian Contemporary Art Museum show Rooms in Rhymes and Estonian National Museum’s show Who Claims the Night. Her film-performance Cellula Filia was presented at an expanded cinema program at Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage 2022 and screened at Whitechapel Gallery among other festivals and venues.