Baltasar Thomas

  • A note on mourning

    This text was first published through my newsletter on November 26, 2024. You can subscribe to my newsletter over here.

    I don’t often send these letters. I’d like to reach out more to people, but well; life. Today I’m sharing a few words and a few images.

    A note on mourning.

    When someone close to you passes on, life feels unreal. I think this feeling of ‘something is truly wrong’ arises from the fact that they are the foundation, the building blocks, of the structure we call self. We are someone in relation to someone else. And so, they pass on and we have to figure out how to rebuild this building that’s missing a foundational piece. How to start and continue this build is a very personal and creative process. I think this is why the often uttered phrase ‘everyone mourns in their own way’ rings so true. Even though this is the case, I think most of us share that sooner or later we come to accept that there’s no brick that will actually fit the empty space left behind; we need to build a new shape from the ground up.

    When my father passed in the spring of 2022, we all dealt with the loss in different ways. I took to writing a lot. Incoherent journal entries where I tried to make sense of jumbled emotions and scattered thoughts

    My mother, Pierik l’Istelle, had her own process. Out of mourning, she started creating. And this became a project where she sought to make the architectural endeavour of sculpting sense out of loss a unifying and universal experience. Working with others, she made Zielsverwanten (Soulmates), a multi-disciplinary performance.

    Zielsverwanten was first performed past summer in the gardens of a beautiful little cemetary called ‘Huis te Vraag’ in Amsterdam. I captured a few moments of the performance and the stage of trees, plants, leaves and bugs.

    Later, on November 2 of this year, the garden was brought inside  and the audience was temporarily transported back to summer when the show was performed at the Plantage Dokzaal and the images were projected as a backdrop to the performance. In the room next to us, hot chocolate milk was poured and tamales were served, as the local Mexican community celebrated Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead).

    Everyone mourns in their own way.

    I’m grateful I could contribute some small thing to the creative path my mother chose to walk. Below you’ll find a few stills from the film we projected. They were shot on 16mm color film. If there’s any project where the fickle and transient nature of a film image is suited, it’s a project that speaks about the fickle and transient nature of life itself.

    Baltasar

  • ‘Dear Daniel,’ (working title)

    For a while now, I’ve been working on a film project about my friend and artist Daniel Vorthuys. It’s been a lot of fun reconnecting with him. This is a short description of the project:

    ‘Dear Daniel,’ will be a film centered around artist Daniel Vorthuys, who explores themes of metamorphosis and identity through poetry, music and performance, inspired by classical literature, myths and fairy tales. The film intertwines documentary and staged scenes in response to Daniel’s artistic endeavors and conceptual explorations. It travels between various historical periods, showcasing Daniel in masculine and feminine roles and using his poetry in the portrayals of lover’s correspondences across ages. Blurring distinctions between reality and fiction, and delving into themes of fragmented identities and romanticism, the project seeks to explore and highlight the complex mosaic of self and otherness. 

    And here are some pictures of Daniel in his studio, taken during one of our first conversations where we dove deep into his artistic practice:

    Daniel is performing with his band Cold in Church on March 22nd at OCCII in Amsterdam to celebrate the launch of their album. I’ll be there celebrating with them and capturing some of their performance on 16mm film as part of the film project.

  • This Era

    After some deliberation, I’ve decided to separate the film and photography work I do for others (artists and other clients), from my own artistic practice. I’ve named the company ‘This Era’. The name stems from the ambition for the company to be involved in projects that reflect this day and age. To be a cinematic support for artistic voices unique to this era and perhaps, not heard enough.

    To celebrate the work I’ve done until now and give a clear visual intention of the type of work I’d like to do more of, I made a trailer, edited to Kimiko Ishizaka’s rendition of Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1: Fugue No. 24 in B Minor’.

    To learn more about This Era and my aims for the company, visit thisera.art.

  • Spectre-19

    Spectre-19 is a multi-channel film installation that takes place in both the material and digital public space. It mixes elements of fiction and documentary film to depict how the collective subconscious processes the social and societal disruption caused by Covid-19.

    Every Friday and Saturday in August 2020, from 10 pm to midnight, the work was projected from the windows of Lab 111 in Amsterdam Oud-West. An online screening could be viewed during the same hours at www.spectre-19.tv.

    During this period, the work changed and grew, refusing to take on a definite shape. The 16mm black and white images were filmed weekly, developed in my darkroom and reassembled for the next screening. Spectre-19 unfolded in time like the shadowy afterimage on the retina, after it has been exposed to a glaring reality.

    The treehouse in the forest shown in one of the scenes in Spectre-19 was made by artist Talisa Kiyiya. Spectre-19 was made possible by Marijn van Haaster, David Wasch, Joppe Harinck,  Onno Petersen, Edwin Schouten, cult cinema LAB111, independent film production company Submarine and live streaming platform WpStream. Spectre-19 is supported by The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK).

  • Every Now and Then

    During the making of this film, I realized that the limitations of found-footage film are its strengths. The inability to pursue continuity editing forces you to combine images you would not have in a traditional narrative setup, and produces unexpected results. It converts the editing room into a creative playground where the world you are creating unfolds piece by piece, through every choice you make.

    Perhaps the result can best be described as dreamlike. Logic is not entirely absent, but never its driving force. Meaning is present, but never fixed. I like the idea of dreams being our way of sorting and processing the things we experience during waking life. ‘Every Now and Then’ may have served me in this sense as well. The selection of images was done intuitively, yet somewhere along the way the edit came to resemble a narrative: a boy is witness to the injustice in the world and aspires to help. Yet he is paralyzed by the violence seemingly inherent to his own kind.

    The film reflects doubts I have on the ability of mankind to think of himself as a species (with the aim to survive and prosper as a species), as opposed to thinking of himself as a singular being (that perpetuates conflict with other beings in order to achieve and maintain prosperity for himself). In other words, shifting from a thinking focused on competition, toward a thinking focused on cooperation.

    ‘Every Now And Then’ – SD video (found footage), 8’53, 2017

    Even though I strongly believe the atrocities in the world should be reported and talked about and not neglected or hidden, I’m painfully aware of the fact that the amount of images I’m exposed to on a daily basis, numbs me to their content. War, poverty, death and decay become abstract familiar ‘things’. There’s an al too real danger of becoming cynical and the cynic is difficult to convince to stay focused on prosperity on a scale that expands beyond his immediate surroundings and short-term personal gains.

    I want to believe art has the power to sensitize the desensitized. Either by exposing the mechanisms here described or by using images in new and unexpected ways to enable emotional response. Both methods may clear paths toward enabling the ability to consider an image worth discussing. Discussion may revive ideals.

  • El Ausente

    El Ausente is a short film about a garden that aims to persuade its inhabitants, visitors and onlookers to disengage from thinking about past (events and feelings) and future (desirable states and outcomes) and instead engage with the ever available present.

    Its images are accompanied by a voice that speaks seductively amidst a discordant melody of analogous and disparate sounds. The voice and sounds give shape to an ongoing friction between ambition, indecisiveness and acceptance.

    ‘El Ausente’ (‘The Absent’) – SD-video, 12’35, 2016
    Mira
    Escucha
    El jardin canta
    Que canta?

    No puedes escuchar?
    Tienes algo mejor que hacer?
    Seguro

    Basta
    Basta de buscar    		Look
    Listen
    The garden is singing
    What’s it singing?

    You can’t listen?
    Got something better to do?
    Are you sure?

    Stop
    Stop searching

  • Playground

    A simple objective/experiment/game: go somewhere, anywhere, and observe.

    ‘Playground’ / ‘these streets’) – HD video, 2’47, 2014

    I recorded children playing in a playground. A wide shot of a residential exterior. The shot, and consequently how I manipulated it’s textures and selected which moments to highlight in the edit, serves as a demonstration of two beliefs that central to my understanding of images:

    • a single image contains many different possible narratives and concepts.
    • these narratives and concepts can support one another or be entirely conflicting, depending on the context (among an endless amount of factors, foremostly: the social and cultural background of the viewer and the presentation of the final image/artwork).

    As an example; an image of a children’s playground can become a symbol of the uninhibited life-experience only children have access to, or it can become a symbol of the violence inherent in human nature. It can be a symbol of anything, really. The main point being: meaning is fickle, unsteady – likely to morph by slight nudging into a certain direction.

  • I could have been a dancer

    In November 2014, I was commissioned by dance company Ultima Vez to make a teaser trailer for a show called ‘Tornar’ by performer/choreographer Seppe Baeyens. During this project, I became interested in finding the balance between being a spectator and being a participant. When I’m filming something or someone, I often feel a sort of tension, caused by the fact that my role is ambiguous. I am a spectator/voyeur – yet, at the same time, my presence shapes the event taking place. The camera becomes part of the performance.

    ‘I could have been a dancer’ – HD video, 8’56, 2016’HD video, 8’56, 2016

    I also learned that the way I perceive the things unfolding before my eyes, can be transformed by these very things themselves. And this evolving perception can in turn affect how I handle the camera. Evidently, when one favours this way of ‘working by instinct’, it means taking a lot of risks, aesthetically. In 2015, I used images shot for the Tornar teaser to make a short autobiographical film called I could have been a dancer. In this film, I extended the idea of the ‘camera as performer’ to my approach in editing.

    The function of editing is setting the rules of space and time for the world I’m creating. By exposing the processes of editing (selecting, categorizing and placing frames next to one another or on top of one another), form becomes content.

  • Close Encounters

    I could say that ‘Close Encounters’ followed from the following assignment I gave myself:

    Mark the beginning (A) of a ritual/paradigm/world.
    Mark its ending (B).

    Walk from A to B.
    What do you see?

    Do its inhabitants greet you with open arms? Or do they approach with caution or even, suspicion? The answer is often: both. Your mission is to observe, and so you observe. Yet for some reason, you feel that you’ve failed. You feel alienated. The act of marking point A and point B has rendered you unable to focus on anything other than point A and point B.

    ‘Close Encounters’ – single screen video-installation, no sound, 34’15 loop, 2016

    Return home, gather your thoughts.
    What to do next?

    Return to said ritual/paradigm/world (repeat).

    Start at the ending (B) and walk toward the beginning (A).
    Only this time, walk slower.

    Return home, gather your thoughts (rinse).

    Repeat.

    Rinse and Repeat.
    Rinse and Repeat.

    Something might catch your eye, as the outlining of said world (marked by point A and B) starts to fade.

  • Cluster

    ‘Cluster’ is one of my earliest short film works. An attempt to express myself while searching for a personal cinematic language. I prefaced the film with a haiku about the same subject: my recurring cluster headaches.

    het duwt zijn nagels
    langzaam dieper in mijn oog
    plotseling stopt het

    ‘Cluster’ – HD video, 4’44, 2015