Ian Purnell – week 1 – Potential Dangers

May 7, 2016

My name is Ian Purnell and I’m a Swiss film maker, video editor and video artist for stage productions.

During my stay at Sasso Residency I’m mainly focusing on a film I’ve been working on for some time already and which I’m going to finish my postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne with.

It’s a documentary film with performative elements set entirely in and around tunnel building sites for future train services.

I’m interested in the artificial tunnel as a space of safety and fears.

The structure of the film will allow the viewer to naturally make cross-connections between the various futuristic sites, evoking a feeling of science fiction.

The work I’ve been doing this week is a mixture between pre- and postproduction. Editing with imagined scenarios, arranging video stills next to sketches and making a lot of phone calls…

We’ve already shot the first part of this film in December in the canton of St. Gallen and are now preparing for the second half that we are going to shoot at the end of our residency stay. We meaning myself and Marie Zahir, Timo Schaub, Stefan Ramírez Pérez, Simon Waskow, Janna Horstmann and Tilman Porschütz who will join me for this project from Cologne, Berlin, Basel and Vienna in the course of the upcoming exciting weeks.

We are all awaiting the opening of the Gotthard-Base-Tunnel in the beginning of June. Next week I’m off to the rehearsals of the promising opening performance!