Stream Visions

La Risus, 2047

Reassemblages is a collection of collaborative responses to the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection. The collection includes film and video works, publications, and materials related to the field of moving image art, focusing on both UK and international artists.

As curator and researcher, Christian developed the project Stream Visions, which explored the connections between Chris Welsby’s film Streamline (1976) and the ritual practices of the Nestinarki dancers of Bulgaria.

Welsby’s Streamline is emblematic of his broader exploration of systems in nature and their interaction with cinematic apparatus. The film, presented in the exhibition courtesy of the LUX archive, was produced using a self-built mechanism that coupled the movement of the river to the camera itself, collapsing the distinction between observer and observed. For Stream Visions we had the rare opportunity, with Welsby’s permission, to exhibit the original filming machine alongside the work—an object that makes tangible his attempt to embed technology within natural process.

The Nestinarki dancers, by contrast, operate through embodied ritual rather than mechanical apparatus. Their fire-walking practice is a trance-driven act in which the dancer’s body becomes a medium for elemental forces, channeling a power that is both material (the burning embers) and immaterial (spiritual energy). In both cases—Welsby’s machine and the Nestinarki ritual—what emerges is a refusal of objectivity in the conventional sense. The subject is not positioned outside of nature but imbricated within it, producing vision through entanglement rather than detachment.

Stream Visions thus staged a dialogue between different epistemologies of nature—technological, ritualistic, aesthetic—while foregrounding their shared insistence on relationality. Both practices demonstrate how processes that might appear invisible or inaccessible can be rendered sensible through alternative modes of mediation.

In curating this project, our aim was not only to juxtapose archival material with ethnographic and artistic research, but also to question how we construct knowledge about the natural world. The archive becomes a site for rethinking observation itself: not as detached recording, but as a practice of immersion, imagination, and reciprocity.