Tommy & Danny in Search of the Future: Different Reasons for Digging a Hole (2018-2020)
In 2018, photographer and filmmaker Tommy Smits and artist Daniel Dmyszewicz spent six months working in a remote location in the desert of Spain, near the village of La Junquera. Travelling around on their moped, they were part of an ecological restoration project, a futuristic village, a festival, and a community of farmers, volunteers and investors. Their film documents the conflicts and absurdity of our contemporary quest for harmony and a better future. On the front line of eco-restoration, the communing volunteer faces the green capitalist, the young scientist criticises EU standardisation, and the importance of a vision balances somewhere between essential and dystopian. Can we create paradise, or are we unable to recognise it once it is there?
The work of Tommy Smits is a marriage between photography, film and sculpture. He likes to work with materials that undergo a hardening process, such as cement and clay. This approach adds a certain weight to the transience of photographic memory and results, among other things, in bizarre picture frames that can withstand eternity, in the hope that future archaeologists will find them. Tommy’s partner-in-crime Daniel Dmyszewicz makes films, drawings, murals and robots. He derives his material from communities that create their own narratives about understanding the world.
HD-movie, 50:00 min.
sculptures: Tommy Smits
murals: Daniel Dmyszewicz
