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.
The Future of Life
By Jonas Lund
Netherlands, 2024, 28 mins, English with English subtitles
In The Future of Life, living forever appears dangerously close. An AI can make all the right decisions for you, so you’re free to enjoy eternity. Regenerate Global, a life sciences company led by Brian, are pushing to release immortality (it’s what the investors need) – but internal politics and human emotions threaten to disrupt the launch.
The Future of Life is the next part in Lund's ‘The Future of’ series on humanity’s relationship with AI, following ‘The Future of Nothing’ and ‘The Future of Something.’ Each film is made in close collaboration with various generative AIs. As the product of AI technology, each work shows rapid video and image processing advancements.
Precursing
By Nina Davies
UK, 2023, 11 mins 13, English with English subtitles
In Nina Davies' film Precursing, a fictional incident involving a self-driving car trained to predict pedestrian movements is discussed through two conversations between four characters. Issues of ghosts, rituals, and the future of the justice system are raised, as well as the expanding borders of the Uncanny Valley into the physical world.
You’re Very Special
By u2p050
2024, France, 13 mins 47, English with English subtitles
In today’s world, the line between truth and interpretation is increasingly complex. “You’re Very Special” doesn’t just ask to revisit a day in history; it invites viewers into our hyper-connected age. Through our screens, each of us had a different view, feeling, and interpretation of the exact moment. This documentary mirrors that multiplicity, offering a look back and a space to ponder our current moment and how we understand it.
As you engage with these synthetic memories, consider how technology shapes our understanding of truth and history. What does it mean to remember an event through the filters of algorithms and machine learning? What do machines remember of that day? What will be the future of archives?
Let Me Fix You
By Dasha Ilina
France, 2022, 12 mins, English with English subtitles
ASMR, as a rising form of online content, reduces the body to a gamable center of pleasure derived from sensory stimuli; it betrays a willingness to perceive the human form as merely a loosely bound collection of mechanical systems vulnerable to exploitation. The subsection of ASMR videos specialized in “robot-repair” perhaps even more so. Focusing thematically on concerns surrounding the rise of robotic carers, this work draws attention to the decreased humanism in care, ethical boundaries regarding who is cared for and how, and to whom the responsibility to repair and maintain falls. Traditionally regarded as a female field, care and maintenance (spaces with limited growth potential) have been disregarded in portrayals of possible futures, preferring to dream of leaving behind a crumbling status quo to explore imagined vistas with space for endless expansion. ‘Let me fix you’ asks us to reassess our relationship to that which requires care and maintenance and to attend to what is present as holistically valuable rather than divisible and exploitable.