PIDIKWE (Rumble) ©Caroline Monnet, 2025
Handmade Temporalities
November 16th, 2025
Screening Venue: Kunstmuseum Thun
White Frame and Kunstmuseum Thun are pleased to collaborate on a short film program curated by WF’s head curator, Chantal Molleur, as part of the exhibition featuring Southeast Asian artist Yee I-Lann. In response to her exploration of colonial histories, collective female labour, and the symbolic power of textiles, this program highlights the significance of handmade work and specialized trades across art, culture, and science.
Through a selection of short films, the program explores craftsmanship and material culture and examines disappearing trades and skills increasingly overshadowed by digitalization, automation, and AI. By drawing connections between Yee I-Lann’s practice and artists reflecting on labour, expertise, and changing economies, the program fosters a dialogue between Southeast Asian, Swiss, and international perspectives. It offers a space to reflect on the value of specialized knowledge and making in an era of rapid technological transformation.
The films examine a range of traditional and specialized practices—from the journeyman tradition in Frei Von Allem to domestic craft in Habkern Hand Broom, and Indigenous performance and resilience in Pidikwe and Mobilize. Others, like Citizen Poet and Shanzhai Screens, explore the evolving roles of language and artisanal labour within shifting global economies.
Our film program
Frei Von Allem (A Free Life)
By Christian Taro Müller and Valentin Brotbek
Switzerland, Documentary, 2015, 19 min., Swiss-German with English subtitles
Going away for three years. Away from friends, family and home. An ancient tradition that only a handful of tradesmen still follow today: the journeyman’s travel. We take the road to accompany travelling apprentices in different phases of their journey and witness a life that hardly anyone feels brave enough to lead.
CITIZEN POET
by Mike Hoolboom
Canada, Experimental, 2017, 8 min, English
After the breakdown the old world beckons, a sunrise in Amsterdam, and in that golden light a poem by Lisa Robertson floats across the waters. Cropped from her sterling poem-essay collection The Nilling, the maestro writes about what must be refused in order to create the borders that make identity possible. Against the borders of state she poses the project of intimate conversation and poetry (“bodies assert their incalculable distance”). Poetry is the speech of citizenship. Pigeons flap, friends clasp hands, a pair of strangers dissolve on the metro, ghost cars, lovers don’t mind the rain, tea sipping, sunset at the bridge. As if he were coming back to life.
Through the poem, we receive rhythm –
it is in the history of poetry
that we have a record
of subjectivity’s movement in language.
The Nilling by Lisa Robertson
Initially finished and exhibited in 2017, it was remixed in 2020. Based on a poem by Lisa Robertson, this retake on belonging and boundaries imagines poetry as a capitalist salve.
Robertson writes about what must be refused to create the borders that make identity possible. Against the refusals that form the state, she poses the project of intimate conversation and poetry (“bodies assert their incalculable distance”). Poetry is the speech of citizenship. Pigeons flap, friends clasp hands, a pair of strangers dissolve on the metro, ghost cars, lovers don’t mind the rain, tea sipping, sunset at the bridge. As if they were coming back to life.
Habkern Hand broom
by Margrit Linder
Switzerland, documentary, 2013, 14 min 15, Swiss-German with English subtitles
Hedy Zenger makes the hand broom in the Swiss village Habkern, in the Bernese Alps. It is made every year in autumn out of Pipe grass (Molinia caerulea) and used in winter to clean around the wood cooking stove. As these stoves are no longer used, the brooms are no longer needed and will eventually disappear.
Mobilize
by Caroline Monnet
Canada, experimental, 2022, 3 min. 34, without dialogue
Guided expertly by those who live on the land and driven by the pulse of the natural world, Mobilize takes us on an exhilarating journey from the far north to the urban south. Over every landscape, in all conditions, everyday life flows with strength, skill and extreme competence. Hands swiftly thread sinew through snowshoes. Axes expertly peel birch bark to make a canoe. A master paddler navigates icy white waters. In the city, Mohawk ironworkers stroll across steel girders, almost touching the sky, and a young woman asserts her place among the towers. The fearless polar punk rhythms of Tanya Tagaq’s Uja underscore the perpetual negotiation between the modern and traditional by a people always moving forward.
Shanzhai Screens
by Paul Heintz
France, documentary, 2020, 23 min., Chinese with English subtitles
The trade of copyist painters in Shenzhen’s Dafen Village is declining but not disappearing. Once known globally for mass-producing oil painting replicas, the village saw a steep drop in international demand after the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Many artists left, and export sales plummeted.
To adapt, the remaining artists have shifted focus to China’s domestic market, creating original works and integrating traditional Chinese styles. Local authorities have supported this shift with cultural investments. However, demand for originals remains modest, so many still rely on reproductions for income. The large-scale copyist industry has faded, but a smaller, evolved version continues to exist.
PIDIKWE (Rumble)
by Caroline Monnet
Canada, performance, 2025, 10 min., without dialogue
Featuring Indigenous women of various generations, Pidikwe integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future. The film explores the links between the intoxication of the Roaring Twenties and our contemporary society. The 16mm filming evokes the largely erroneous representations of early cinema and the exploitation of the female body by the colonial gaze. Pidikwe offers these women the chance to regain control of their image and embark on a process of self-determination, so that they can look to the future of cinema with serenity.