Vostok, Faretheewell
2011, super 8 film transferred to HD video, 35 minutes
Yukitomo is a Japanese designer touring Berlin, while at the same time attempting to create a computer model of a space ship for a science fiction movie set in the year 2612. In Graydon’s Vostok, Farethewell Yukitomo’s ship, the Vostok, propels him into a material exploration of Berlin’s surfaces in search of the right skin for his three dimensional model. The building of this model becomes an indirect investigation into the ideological and historical traces that pervade the city’s architecture. Berlin appears as the quintessential city of the twentieth century, having born witness to the major forces and contending ideologies that have defined the last several hundred years.
“A sense of loss and transience figures greatly in Graydon’s film. Presence, erasures, traces all intertwine to create a poetic investigation into this city as a testing ground for what are now lost visions of utopia. As Yukitomo propels himself into the future using the bare materials of Berlin’s surfaces, as his ship forms and un-forms, the problematics of such projections come to the fore reflecting a state of transience and unbecoming. In the film Berlin is por- trayed as a city whose present state is constituted in a strange temporal flux. Having served as the testing ground for so many of the visions of twentieth century architects, the city seems to somehow contain the ruins of some future civilization.”
— Yvan Rosa, ArtSlant