Directed by Freja Sofie Kirk
Produced by Morph Film
2022
Through a bird’s collision with glass, Killing Kidding Colliding looks at the connections between architecture and image production. The film shows glass is as both a material and as a symbol of ideology: Moving between transparency and reflection, making things available to see, but unavailable to touch.
A bird flying in a smooth, transparent and artificial landscape leads us into empty lobbies, offices and conference rooms to finally collide with a glass facade. Images of a taxidermy shows the bird’s transformation into a surface itself; an empty shell; an image or mirroring of the architecture that killed it.
Killing Kidding Colliding is shot in various banks in Frankfurt. Authoritative spaces, not unlike cathedrals, which are designed to function as images and which fundamentally reject one as a body. Through these spaces, the video looks into the power and the ideology that contemporary architecture mediates and how the openness, transparency and smoothness of glass holds an underlying, seemingly invisible, violence.
Through the mechanic movements of the camera and the visibility of technical equipment, the film reveals its own process and materiality. The cinematic illusion is punctured and results in a fragmented story about glass seen through a bird's fleeting life and subsequent death. Killing Kidding Colliding questions what it means to be a body in a world of images; an attempt to renegotiate the power dynamics between body and architecture.