Andro Eradze "Flowering and Fading"

In the organizer's words:

ANDRO ERADZE: FLOWERING AND FADING

Flowering and Fading, a short film by Andro Eradze from 2024 lasting a good quarter of an hour, is film as pure mood, tension, intensification: an intensification, a build-up towards a climax that never comes. Nothing happens here and yet a lot happens, or: there is nothing, and yet there is something. It is the classic setting of the horror film. Here it is used as an evocation of the uncanny in the unseen and the implied to celebrate the cinematic means as such in a perfect way and freed from almost any narrative ballast.

Around a central, hinge-like scene of an overturned honey jar, the film depicts a strange, intangible dreamlike state. The boundaries between the individual protagonists - people, animals, but also the wind, the forest, an old, creaking house, the honey jar itself, the leaves, the light and the unsettling wafting sounds as well as all the other cinematic devices - dissolve and flow over into a floating intermediate realm in which it no longer matters whether things are on the ground or flying through the air.

With slow, "morphing" changes, Andro Eradzes succeeds in bringing the inanimate to life. Bringing the dead to life is ultimately not only the specialty of the horror film, whose logic of suspense drives flowering and fading to a stylized perfection, but of the sublime illusion machine that is cinema as a whole.

BIO:

Andro Eradze lives and works in Tbilisi/Georgia. His artistic works and films have been shown in numerous exhibitions and screened at film festivals, including the New Museum, New York, USA (2021), the 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022), the 22nd Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil, the 14th Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas, Turkey (2022), and the 22nd Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil. Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas, Lithuania (all 2023), at SpazioA, Pistoia, at the Artissima in Turin, the 9th Biennale Gherdëina, Val Gardena, all Italy, as well as at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (all 2024), or at MoMA PS1, New York, as well as at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (both 2025). In 2023 he completed the WIELS residency program in Brussels.