Miniature Minutes (Out of the Blue)

„Miniature Minutes“ is the penultimate work within Olicía’s “Out of the Blue” cycle. It is the result of their collaboration with the experimental film maker Lisa Hoffmann, based in Berlin. It has taken on the form of a series of seven songs and corresponding films, each of exactly one minute duration. The artists aimed for a spontaneous “playing in the sandbox”-approach for this, a very immediate and raw form that opens up new ways of composition and visualization. The ideas on display, nonetheless, are a quite fundamental with each individual work representing one thought or position, such as intimacy (Under White Sheets), the collision of external and internal drives and motivations (Bälle), worlds within worlds (Microscope), or autonomy in interpersonal relationships (Demandé).

“One More Minute asks what I would do if there were literally only one more minute left. I'd try to stay calm and live through the moment with all my senses - safe in the arms of a loved one.”, Fama explains one of song’s thought process. Anna regards the idea of total honesty in an interpersonal relationship in “Under White Sheets” as “an encounter in which two people - protected and sheltered under the covers – can say everything to each other that they might not be able to say in the ‘real world’ and in daylight.”

The corresponding videos by Lisa Hoffmann visit different miniature worlds like an insect: a bed room, a snow globe, a tiny snail, a computer screen and its pixels. Also formally, the works are about limitations: one shots, one-minute-duration, and analogue effects, applying different lenses and magnification glasses.  “Thinking about scale is interesting,”  Lisa Hoffmann, “because it quickly enables us to leave our human-centered perspective. What is one minute? One minute in film terms is 60 times 24 images. One minute, in snail terms, probably feels different. And without a clock, each minute feels different: When you are in a hurry vs. when you are bored. The moving images can stretch a minute, or slow it down. Is there a lot of action, are there repeating images? Also space stretches and compresses. Optical tools, such as cameras and lenses, can help to zoom in or out.” She describes her process as “very experimental at first until a choreography emerges from it. Then, the precision work begins.” The seven films, she arrives at, have a logical order, they are interconnected through certain details and play with recurring motifs, just like the songs.

Lisa Hoffmann

Lisa Hoffmann (*1991, Schlema) is moving between art, film, research and performance. She graduated from Bauhaus University Weimar and Berlin University of the Arts and is an active member of the collective Klasse Klima. Her work is equally material- as research-driven. She is investigating transitional states, daily life fictions & fragmented realities with a focus on the double eco-eco crisis, anxieties within capitalism & the deconstruction of dominant narratives. Her work is shown internationally and frequently. She lives and works in Berlin.

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Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue is a cycle of songs and corresponding works of art that are born from dialogue – from conversation and exchange between the two musicians in Olicía and artists in other genres, such as painting, fashion, dance, literature, film making, design, or arts and crafts. The works are gradually developed, ping-ponged back and forth, playfully shaped into their final form. Learning and borrowing from one another in the process - adapting strategies, materials, structures, or approaches. From an exchange of ideas and sentiments and their - at times - vague and fuzzy articulations into dots and notes, shapes and chords, textures, patterns, configurations, and designs. In the end, the result will be two separate works of art, existing on equal footing, sharing the same seed, still conversing with one another, complementing one another, or simply exploring the same ideas while venturing out into opposite directions.