alovestorysomewherearound2046: decor construct

 
alovestorysomewherearound2046: decor construct stages a public conversation between artist Edgar Schmitz, curator Pieternel Vermoortel and production designer Andy Nicholson on the interfacing of digital technology with traditional work-flows and techniques in the design of productions. How does production design determine the role of the actors, how does it define a setting, how does it blur the given with the virtual? Decor construct shadows the production of alovestorysomewherearound2046, a collaborative film treatment by Edgar Schmitz and Pieternel Vermoortel that turns their past exhibitions into raw material for a lovestory set in the near future. One exhibition normally provides material for one scene in the treatment, which becomes its distorted and slightly delayed mirror in the suspended state of a sci-fi film always yet to be made.
As part of this ongoing production, Schmitz and Vermoortel will stage two more meetings at LUX, which will focus on sound and cinematography and expand the exhibition-scenes of the film treatment by subjecting them to the pre-production patterns of feature films.
Andy Nicholson has worked with Director Alfonso Cuaron on Gravity; receiving OSCAR, BAFTA & ADG nominations for Production Design. He recently completed work on the science fiction action drama Divergent, starring Kate Winslet and Shailene Woodley under the direction of Neil Burger and The Host directed by Andrew Niccol.

 Nicholson has worked several times with director Tim Burton, starting in 1999 as an Art Director on Sleepy Hollow, for which he won an Art Directors Guild (ADG) Award. He earned another ADG Award nomination for his work as an Art Director on Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and has since collaborated with the director as a Supervising Art Director on Alice in Wonderland and as a visual development Art Director onFrankenweenie. 

Andy won an ADG Award for his work on Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass, and received ADG Award nominations for Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum and Joe Johnston’s Captain America.
Edgar Schmitz is an artist who has often borrowed cinematic motifs, atmospheres and modes of attention to orchestrate his practice. Recent exhibitions include British Art Show 7/In the Days of the Comet (Hayward Touring 2010/11) and Surplus Cameo Decor (Cooper Gallery, Dundee and Himalayas Art Museum, Shanghai, 2012-14).
Pieternel Vermoortel’s curatorial practice operates as a reflexive manner of production within given institutional frameworks. Her most recent programme as FormContent has functioned as a performative script, a production and dissemination mode that uses scripting conventions as form through which to produce (and reflect upon the production of) the exhibition as specific cultural object.
Schmitz and Vermoortel have worked together since 2006 in various distributions as artist and curator, often swapping and/or overlapping their roles in the process. The film treatment accompanies both practices as work in development under the externalised mirror perspective of production and dissemination.
Supported by Goldsmiths Research Support Awards.