Coffee grounds cinema
Organic film processing workshop with Dagie Brundert
Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art invites you to a workshop on filming with a Super 8 camera and the organic processing of films with Dagie Brundert. The event accompanies Party’s Over film review.
“For some time now, I have been experimenting with alternatives to a conventional, environmentally harmful developer” – explains Dagie Brundert. “And I’ve stumbled upon CAFFENOL, a black-and-white negative developer for film and photo. CAFFENOL consists of instant coffee, vitamin C powder and washing soda. All three you can easily buy at your local supermarket. Better buy the cheapest coffees, it’s all about the caffeic acid in it: bad for the stomach, essential for developing! The soup can be flushed into the toilet after one-time use. And how and why does it work? Coffee contains phenols, the small sisters of Hydrochinone, the main ingredient of many black-and-white developers. Phenols are found in various plants and foods: coffee, tea, vodka, potatoes, black currant, mushrooms, vanilla, whiskey, tree bark, various flower blossoms... So I mix the above plants and drinks (raw potatoes, make blossom tea, chop and cook green leaves and herbs) and mix (important!) with vitamin c powder (contrast enhancer, grain cleaner and light clarifier) and washing soda. The results are just as good as conventional developers (even better!), since nothing is greasy, limp or brownish, on the contrary: I’m always amazed how nicely the soups work: rich in nuances and good contrasts. Plus it smells interesting, a bit like in an alchemist brewery: stirring the brew, sniffing, murmuring spells...”
- The workshops will take place on Saturday, 30 November, 2019 from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. in the Activity Room behind the cinema. There is a maximum of 6 participants. Prior knowledge and experience are not required. The event will be held in English. The cost of participation is 80 zł. It includes all the materials.
- The participants get:
- access to the knowledge of Dagie Brundert
- the possibility of using an 8mm camera and experimenting with it
- half a roll of tape (two people will share one cassette, which holds 3 minutes of film)
- all necessary products for film development
- a unique adventure brewing the soup
- good old fun in the darkroom
- coffee, water, cakes
- access to the film digitized by Dagie Brundert a few weeks after the workshop.
- After the organic film processing workshop, we warmly invite you to an open screening of Dagie Brundert’s films. The German artist, in love with the Super 8mm camera and tape, tries – as she says – to consume bizarrely beautiful things from this world, chew them up, and spit them out. For years, she has been working with analogue tape, the oldest and simplest methods of analogue photography, and is experimenting with home based, organic film processing methods.
- Dagie Brundert
