On the first day of the thirteenth month, in a dark room, a solitary figure wanders through dreams, memories, and hallucinations.

I like to think about the plastic possibilities of cinema in conjunction with bodily exploration, in a quest for dynamism and surprise in the image. In this piece, there is an intrinsic theme of identity, memory, and displacement between Mexico and California, and the impression of those geographies on my gaze.

Taking the Labyrinth as main historical inspiration, the film connects mythology to a present socio-political reality in Palestine. Filmed in particular ancient sites in Palestine—caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys—the land becomes our main character. The work traverses beyond the first layer of visibility, and reveals a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know, pointing to what was lost, forgotten, or unsaid. The film expands a sense of historical loss while creating a space for the past to recur; not merely to go back to the facts, but to further open the imaginary gaps. Hazy scenes combine gestures of the ancient world related to goddesses, caves, and offerings, with ritualistic performances of the community and everyday gestures. It emphasizes, therefore, the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

"Doppelwelt" is the new video project by multidisciplinary artist Alyssa Taylor Wendt. Here she embraces past lives, the fluidity of genders, mirroring and divination, the power of collective consciousness, and alternate realities. These constructs are the basis for the final video in her trilogy about memory, which includes her previous films H A I N T and T M I. This experimental 37-minute video contains abstracts of imagery generated by multiple personal past life regressions undertaken by the artist, ultimately presenting a kind of spiritual inheritance that is grounded by an equalized pool of consciousness. Using the mythical trope of a “Doppelgänger,” or double self, which is genderfluid by tradition, she combines abstracted visuals with a languid voiceover to take us through 13 of her previous lives like a guided meditation for freeing the intangible burdens of inherited memory.