Soda_Jerk:
Rewriting Fact with Fiction
VAULT talks to the indefatigable sibling duo who make up Soda_Jerk about their approach to making and unmaking film.
Have you ever rewatched a film from your childhood and thought, “This isn’t the movie I remember”? You get an ineffable yet unshakable sense that something isn’t right – that the thin layer of dust that coats your copy of Mrs. Doubtfire has somehow corroded it. Maybe, the film isn’t a whimsical take on a father trying to spend quality time with his kids after all, but a disturbing account of one man’s inability to respect court-mandated boundaries and insistence on maintaining some form of domestic control. Of course, the 1993 comedy-drama hasn’t changed; I have.
While most people will eventually leave their sense of disappointment behind, the artworks of two-person art collective Soda_Jerk seem to revel in the inadequacy of these memories. Sydney-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro produce films which reframe and remake old narratives anew. In their hands, a medium that has always been defined by its rigidity, by its ‘final cut’, becomes fluid again as films are spliced, edited and re-edited, and are drastically transformed into a kaleidoscopic mix of untold stories. “We can get pretty crypto-mystical talking about sampling, and how it’s really a form of contemporary witchcraft. But guess the short-story version is that we make films entirely constructed of samples from existing movies, music or other media,” they say.
“Perhaps we’re more like renegade archivists than we are filmmakers, because what we’re really doing is strategically reorganising and archiving existing culture... Subscribe to read this article in full
