“Once, waiting for someone in the Café des Deux Magots in Paris, Benjamin managed to draw a diagram of his life: it was like a labyrinth, in which each important relationship figures as ‘an entrance to the maze.’”
Susan Sontag writing about Walter Benjamin in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980)
In April 2020, I reached out to over thirty artists who I have met over the past decade in different parts of the world and at different times. I asked them if they wanted to participate in a collaborative film which documents working artists today. Ten of them committed to this film project and they started filming their daily lives and routines between April and July 2020.
The result is an audio-visual collage created by artists who are based in the US, Canada, the UK and Germany. Even though the film brings together various voices, approaches, media and ideas, all artists participating share the drive to keep making work, to keep digging deeper into who they are and what it means to be making art today.
Even though the majority of the footage was shot between April and July 2020, some material was recorded in 2019 with the intention to draw a distinction between the 'Beforetimes' and the 'Aftertimes'. After the Beforetimes does not simply document working artists today, but it also offers a reflection on our current times with their partisan politics, societal division, an ongoing pandemic, and the personal toll these issues take on each of us.
These are the participating artists (click on each artist’s larger image to be directed to more information/personal websites):
