Rose Lowder | Bouquets

Rose Lowder: Towards a Deleuzian Cinematic Ecology

For Rose Lowder, neither the landscape, the flora, the fauna, nor the organic farm constitute the fundamental elements of the film; rather, it is the operations of alternations, permutations, and focal variations that do so. The Bouquets series (1994–2022) employs an intra-image editing method, and makes its structure the very object of a spectatorial experience, one altogether striking, poetic, and ecological – the latter term to be understood as an expanded cinema of “ecology”, both for the attention paid to the filmed subjects and for its structural practice, based on a rigorous use of the filmic material.

Presented at the Kunsthalle Zürich, this series constitutes an eloquent paradigm of experimental cinema, articulating a filmmaking technique based on frame-by-frame weaving, operational modes of structural cinema, and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “crystal-image” (The Time-Image, 1985): an image in which past and present mirror one another simultaneously, so as to unfold time within the frame depth. Part of a body of visual explorations on spatio-temporal potentialities of the celluloid, this corpus of forty films illustrates how, over several decades, the Franco-Peruvian filmmaker developed a cinematographic practice centred on the very mechanics of the camera.

Comprising approximately 1440 frames (one minute of film), a “bouquet” results from the process in which Lowder advances and rewinds 16mm celluloid in her Bolex, alternating frame exposures with lens stops, and leaving blank spaces for a second pass of the film; all of this is recorded in her notebook. This protocol allows the assembly of shots captured at distinct moments of the same location, to modify focus, and to organize the alternation of heterogeneous fragments. The celluloid thus becomes a structural matrix in which time is redefined at frame scale, making its materiality evident. By developing filming methods through direct manipulation of celluloid (rewinds and successive exposures), Lowder aligns her botanical series within a purely cinematic time, as envisioned by Gilles Deleuze with the crystal-image.

For the artist, the image functions as a here-and-now, yet carries within it the virtuality of preceding frames – their implicit memory – and the latency of those to come, so that the projection brings out a non-linear, condensed temporal co-presence, punctuated by micro-shifts. A present frame is immediately overlapped by another, occupying the same position within a non-hierarchical visual structure. We then perceive an array of stratified temporalities, within a regime of diffraction. Intensifying this crystalline configuration, the multi-screen installation, designed by the Kunsthalle, multiplies the points of perception – “retinal bouquets” – and constitutes a locus in which each image interacts with the others, imprinting its aura within the screen space.

It then became apparent to me that the two rows of five double-sided screens, placed back-to-back, unfolded in the form of “layers” of Deleuzian cinema-tableaux, where the frames evoked a kinetic weaving of pictorial fragments. Moreover, through the flickering effects, Lowder’s cinematic Bouquets made me even more aware of the temporal fragmentation that Deleuze identifies as a mode of time manifestation, rather than as a moving representation of the real. To fully comprehend the installation, I therefore had to move back and forth several times, and with each traversal my experience of the films differed. As I wandered through the space, the visual flows and temporalities were continuously rearranged, leading me to reconsider at every moment the way in which I perceived Bouquets.

Immersed in the rhythms of viewing, the luminous beauty of the projected images and the silence of the space placed my body in frontal relation to the works, unmistakeably generated by the systemic and discursive strategy of the museum: that of the spectacular. The absence of sounds and projector hum established an attraction-based exhibition modality that favours a purely iconographic display. The choice of digital projection, rather than 16mm analogue – certainly more practical for a ten-screen apparatus – seemed to me, through this sonic emptiness, to annihilate the material existence of the celluloid, running counter to Lowder’s structural practice. Yet, upon reflection, this dematerialization can also be considered as an operative perceptual agent, in coherence with the aesthetic frameworks of Lowder’s handmade cinema.