Interview: Kate NV & Sasha Kulak
Read below, as our own Brandon Sanchez sits down with Kate NV, and director Sasha Kulak to discuss their short film, для FOR.
I understand ordinary daily routines are an inspiration behind для FOR (The Film). Do you both find that having some sort of structured, mundane, daily routine can help free up one’s mind to think creatively at other times during the day?
Sasha Kulak: All I know about the inspiration that it mostly comes when the brain isn’t overheated. Probably for some people having a daily routine is the way to allow creativity explodes with ideas. I’m not in this style so I don’t really know if it’s true.
Kate NV: Doing repetitive actions and daily routine sometimes can help you to concentrate on something else. For me, this repetitive thing is my bike. When my body is busy cycling and half of my brain is concentrated on a road — I feel that I can hear and see more. That’s why I prefer to listen to the music when I’m cycling. I really feel that the physical process and body occupation clears some space in my mind and draws my attention to something that I’ve never noticed before. Even if I know the music that I’m listening to pretty well. Great ideas come into my mind while I’m cycling around Moscow. But I would love to reach this level of thoughts concentration without doing anything.
Do you find beauty in the mundane? If so, or if not, why?
SK: For me, those structured and scheduled days look like something I always desire but at the same time I am afraid of and postpone to have. It’s something impossible to reach and highly respected in other’s people life. So, in the video, it is a perfect idyllic and mythical model of life which could not but inspired.
NV: All ingenious is simple. I think being able to find the beauty in simple things is important. It’s like a special kind of harmony and zen. Washing dishes, taking a shower, wiping the dust, doing some morning workouts, cleaning your room—all these simple things help you not only to organize the space around you, but your mind also.
In addition to routines, there seems to be a theme of passing from the present in для FOR (The Film). Images elongate and warp through a continuum of time. How does time play in to both of your artistic practices?
SK: To be honest I’m still trying to get it. This video carries with it only one and highly subjective idea about time.
NV: Music is a sound organized in time. So I guess I can say that I’m in a constant exploration of time and sound. Time shrinks and stretches. this is especially noticeable at concerts. sometimes a minute can last forever, and sometimes it flies as a second. There are, however, people with the perfect sense of time, but i know only few of them and they’ve been practicing a lot to reach this level. In stressful situations, almost everyone gets really confused and loses the sense of time. It’s quite interesting. In our video, the day is stretched along with the objects and the main character. Sometimes it happens when you are stuck in routine processes and you get sucked into reality that is enveloping you.
Kate, your live shows surrounding для FOR’s release feature Sasha’s visuals, but each time you play they are randomized. Why did you choose to have them randomized in the live setting, and how does that randomization process work?
NV: We’ve only performed it once—it was a short movie premiere in Moscow. The process was simple—we have asked our friend to become a VJ and play all the videos in different order (except those two where our character wakes up and goes to bed) He also had an option to start and end the day. So he could «create» one day during our concert or two days or even three. And again it all (the length of an action or the whole day) depended on his own sense of time. The idea of randomised videos came to our minds when we started thinking of the premiere concert. We just thought that it would be awesome to recreate the daily routine as it is—by repeating same actions day by day but in different order. cause days can be really the same but different at the same time.
