2015–2016
During the post-production of Rey, I returned to buried film for a final sequence of experiments on 35 mm. This journal brings together the burial and unearthing, the “precarious restoration” of the material, and the artisanal transfer through which those altered images entered the film.
The work moved between earth, water, light and the editing room. We unearthed the reels, separated and cleaned the damaged strips, and worked patiently with a material that could no longer be treated as an intact negative. Restoration here did not mean erasing what had happened underground. It meant finding a way to handle the film and recover an image while allowing the traces of its burial to remain.
I worked on this stage with the post-production team, including editors Benjamin Mirguet and Catalina Marin, cinematographer Benjamin Echazarreta, and a wider crew who helped restore the film. My son also took part. These photographs document that shared work, from the handling of the buried material to the improvised arrangements for transferring it into digital images.
The transfer was another part of the experiment: an artisanal process of working with the film, projection and a camera rather than treating digitization as a neutral final step. The same strip could become a different image as we changed the way it met the light.