A film by Gina Czarnecki & Ulf Langheinrich
Funded by Capture
Supported by Arts Council England
Distributed by Gina Czarnecki and Forma
Copyright Czarnecki & Langheinrich 2008

Spintex attempts to encapsulate the multiple, interconnected daily rhythms of physicality and mortality that resonate in the environment and the dance.

The images appear to dissolve within the noise and pixels of the surfaces, but emerge to striking effect before becoming highly textured again. The flickering pulse underlying these transformations is resounding, deep, immersive and total.

Spintex was filmed at an open-air nightclub and other locations in the Ashanti region of Ghana where the transformation from bright sunlight leads from red, to blue to deep black, and night lasts only fifteen minutes all year round.

On Spintex Road, the air is dusty and humid, loaded with scent and stench. As night falls, the ambient sound shifts. The incessant calls of cicadas and the drone of mosquitoes join the wall of noise created by millions of insects and amphibians along with the constant rumble of generators and distant traffic. Rival Christian churches broadcast hymns at competing volumes from speaker systems on their roofs, and female voices sing deeply in the Twi-Fante language. At the dance in an old roofless shell by the beach, throbbing masses are engulfed in trance. The pulsing crowd forms one motion, one being; a rhythmic, sexual and elemental force as brutal as the cycles of the natural world around it. The imagery vibrates with movement and extreme details: a face, a look, a gesture… the joy and release.

Gina Czarnecki, 2008

Filmed in Spintex, Accra with electronic recording, reproduction and disintegration processes.