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THE S H A D O W , in its traditional role, is a subtle yet powerful metaphor for the quality imposed upon women, ´nature´ or matter. All these entities, within patriarchal logic, belong to the object that exploits them, and their very existence is conditioned by that object. Their role is to relate, to complement, or to reflect, never to exist for themselves. They are the shadows of central and dominant figures: man, civilisation, rational thought.
[ --- SPECULATIVE SHADOWLOGY ]
Even if the shadow depends on the light and the object to exist, without it, the light would either be unbearable (omnipresent and blinding) or simply uninteresting. Similarly, objects would reveal themselves to one another without volume or contour, constantly colliding due to their unintelligibility. This apparent dependency thus conceals a symbiotic power essential for all photosensitive beings. Similarly, human women and all the other 'second-class beings' uphold the very structures of the human world.
Reversing this paradigm —transforming the object into the shadow of a shadow— overturns the established order. The object fades into a reflection of a greater, more fluid, freer force. More than a game of reversal and revenge, it evokes the dissolution of rigid categories and dualisms (subject/object, man/woman, human/non-human).
By surpassing the traditional perception of the shadow as an absence or negative, we reframe it within a speculative vision where it constitutes a hyperobject, of which we can only see fragments, echoes of a vaster, less perceptible order. Let us abandon simplistic dualisms to explore the blurred and unsettling zones of interconnections. Within this framework, the shadow becomes an active interface, revealing the complex relationships between what is visible and what remains hidden. Far from simply complementing light, it acts as a vector of interdependence and transformation, showing us spaces where life and thought meet. Even if they are not pretty.
Human history shows that rich forms of absurd art often emerge after major conflicts, echoing the upheavals and absurdities of those times. Today, the looming conflict seems inevitable, fuelled by the headlong rush of a toxic economic system (capitalism) and by what underpins it: a limitless enterprise of total reification. Let us attempt together to understand our ambivalences towards this foolish process.
We wish to invite you to try a cinema that is collaborative, inclusive, and more-than-inclusive —a cinema that does not seek to impose a vision, but to open spaces for co-creation and interconnection. We see this cinema as a possible form of a new absurd art, an attempt to collectively explore answers to the void, to tensions, and to uncertainty.
Here is the plan:
1) FakeMovie.txt
Write a fake film script first. Include beautiful characters, dense thoughts, and philosophical fantasies. Steal from the best: draw inspiration from the style of your favourite filmmakers. But this is not meant to be fun. Unlike the effect of a joke or a parody, the deception will never be revealed. In reality, the film will never be seen by anyone. At this stage, the only thing that matters is that the film, the ideas, and the characters exist for you.
2) TrailerShoot (optional)
Sometimes, we film only a trailer — the smallest material unit through which a film can be said to exist. It is short, dense, intriguing, tangible, and easily shareable. But it is also, quite simply, great fun to do with friends: trying to understand and to match, like forgers, the poetry and techniques of cult filmmakers. (But, since geniuses are of course inimitable, we recommend pretending to be a student of X., or an overlooked contemporary of Y.)
The other great satisfaction is economic and ecological: crafting a non-film with negligible financial and energetic resources. For example, here is the complete carbon footprint for Unmade Frames #22: 12.5 kg CO₂ ... 200 000 times less CO₂ than an average Hollywood blockbuster.
3) WebPlanting
The real life of the unborn film unfolds through its paratexts: fake interviews, imagined reviews, critical essays, choreographic, musical or other adaptations… Embed it within fake vintage websites, blogs, forgotten or obscure YouTube channels willing to collaborate secretly. An ecology of fragments —hidden in plain sight— each affecting the next.
4) ParatextLife
Do nothing. Let digital nostalgia, time and entropy activate the work. The film disappears — apparently —but latency is a form of life: silent anticipation, slow composting. Be ready to believe in any conception of Time. And keep adding paratexts.
Unmade Frames is an artistic research project situated at the threshold of post-cinema and beyond, conceived as a form of absurdist action-research. Departing from the assumption that the most durable trace of a film is not its material support but the memories, affects, and discussions it generates, the project radicalises cinema by removing the necessity of the film altogether. Its works exist in a state of latency: non-films that exist and do not exist simultaneously.
Formally, the project operates through diffraction, postponement, and deliberate supercherie. Films are “buried” rather than produced and their constellations of anachronistic fragments, paratexts, and rumours are planted across digital spaces. If meaning emerges, it is only an ephemeral and ambiguous relational event co-produced by spectators, contexts, and temporal delays. Unmade Frames can be described as a form of absurdist action-research. By this, we refer to a research practice that deliberately embraces contradiction, uncertainty, and non-resolution as methodological tools. Within this project, the artwork functions simultaneously as object, method, and field. Each fragment operates as a hypothesis and each interpretation as a situated result. As an absurdist practice, it accepts that no participant -creators included- can ever fully grasp the totality of the project.
Far from being a nihilistic filmentropy, Unmade Frames is united by a shared ambition: to cultivate, through cinema, a collective capacity to identify and tolerate ambivalence. Each of the project’s non-films is structured around major philosophical concepts designed to destabilise certainties, while submitting them to concrete narrative and affective collisions. Theoretically, Unmade Frames draws on dark ecology and the concept of 'hyperobject' to challenge anthropocentric and linear conceptions of time, authorship, and representation. Politically, it proposes a cinema capable of resisting authoritarian or algorithmic capture not through frontal opposition, but by practising 'negative capability' as a collective skill. Inviting spectators to remain with uncertainty long enough for new forms of perception, relation, and collective imagination to emerge.
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unmadeframes (at) proton.me