My film “A Crooked Path Through The Dark” has recently been selected for several film festivals, including the Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht (Berlin), where it won the Main Jury Award in the International Competition for Cinema in Transgression; the Choreoscope Barcelona Dance Film Festival (Spain); the Interface Video Art Festival (Croatia); the Moviate Underground Film Festival (USA); the Festival internazionale Segni della notte (Italy); and the Realtime International Film Festival (UK), where it received an honourable mention.
I was invited to curate a special short film programme focused on butoh for the 2023 edition of the Choreoscope International Dance Film Festival (Barcelona). We have selected a diverse range of films by artists including naoto iina, Emiko Agatsuma, and Karolina Bieszczad-Stie. My own film “A Crooked Path Through The Dark” will also be presented as part of a programme that aims to show the diversity of approaches that butoh encompasses. The programme will be screening online on the streaming platform Filmin from the 23rd of October until the 31st of December, here: https://www.filmin.es/festival/choreoscope-2023 In addition, I wrote a text for the festival which gives an introductory overview of butoh and the selected films from the programme, which can be read in English here, and in Spanish here.
Very happy to announce that I’m releasing a new publication collecting a series of drawings made over the last few years. Hand-numbered and signed limited edition with 48 works, as well as texts by artists Sergi Botella and Paco Chanivet. More info soon, until then here’s a video trailer for it :::
“Magma and combustion, expansion and reduction. These are biologically based rhythms that also feature in the work of David Franklin. His series of drawings are of chronotypic ascendancy: sequences of condensed temporality in which the artist freezes abstract rhythms and projections that dilate or contract the space-time in which life unfolds. Macro worlds — the cosmos — and micro worlds — cellular biological processes — are often represented at moments of explosiveness or maximum intensity at a time of expansive growth. In Franklin’s recent work, these moments of organic combustion have generated more diaphanous, contained drawings in which accidental stains and traces appear subtly over indeterminate arquitechtural spaces. To the artist’s gaze, they appear as echoes of memory which (as in the case of Xavier Grau), he attempts to distance himself so as to represent the form we see in the most direct and simple way possible.”
Albert Mercadé, from the catalogue to the exhibition “Our Garden Needs Its Flowers” at Tecla Sala, L´Hospitalet, April 2021.
Castellano:
Magma y combustión, expansión y reducción, son ritmos de base biológica que también se ponen en juego en la obra de David Franklin. Sus secuencias de dibujos son de ascendiente cronotípico: secuencias de temporalidad condensada en las que el artista congela ritmos y proyecciones abstractas que dilatan o contraen el espacio-tiempo donde se despliega la vida. Los mundos macro — el cosmos — o micro — los procesos biológicos celulares — a menudo están representados en el momento de explosividad o de máxima intensidad de un periodo de crecimiento. En la obra reciente de Franklin estos momentos de combustión orgánica had dado lugar a dibujos más diáfanos y acotados, donde aparecen sutilmente manchas y trazos accidentales sobre espacios arquitectónicos indeterminados, y aparecen a sus ojos como ecos de la memoria, de la que, como Xavier Grau, trata de distanciarse lo más posible a fin de representar la forma visitada del modo más directo y sencillo.
Albert Mercadé, del catalogo de la exposición “Our Garden Needs Its Flowers” a Tecla Sala, L´Hospitalet, abril 2021.
