Serigala Militia, 2006
Stop-motion animation with 402 individually crafted block prints
4 minutes 22 seconds
Music: Seringai
Original in the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (Japan)
Ting*, 2008
Stop-motion animation with several hundred porcelain vessels
3 minutes 2 seconds
Music: Bagus Pandega
© Tromarama for both works
The artistic trio Tromarama uses different media such as woodcut, photography, photo copying, collage, embroidery, painting and drawing for their stop-motion animations. Stop-motion is a film technique which uses immobile objects to create an animation. It is applied for animated cartoons, but also for special effects in live-action films. The technique was already known in the 19th century, and was still applied until the 1980s in such movies as Terminator and Star Wars. Although the film industry uses digital technology today, the stop-motion technique, more than ever, has great appeal with art and its spectators. On the one hand, the “imperfect” illusion of a fluent sequence of pictures instantly reminds us that the history of photography and that of film are very closely linked. On the other hand, the technique, by stringing together single pictures, remains, depending on which material one uses ? wood and porcelain in our case ?, the only possibility to animate inanimate objects.
Serigala Militia (2006) was created as a music video for the metal band Seringai, which is very popular in the scene. One can view the video as a reinterpretation of the block printing technique because, while the art of block printing usually only presents the sheet as the result of an elaborate process of carving and printing, this animation actually allows us to view the processed and blackened printing plates. In combination with the raw music, the processing of the notched and engraved wood becomes perceptible in a playful way. In Ting* (2008) Tromarama distance themselves from the typical music video. The unique story it presents is about porcelain tableware, such as cups, plates and jars, which have become sick of their shadowy existence in the cupboard. In perfect synchronisation, Bagus Pandega underlines the scene with the resonating sound of vessels filled with different amounts of water ? as if the escaped tableware were speaking to us through the autumn leaves with clear and bright sounds in a call for freedom.
The artistic collective Tromarama, founded in 2004, consists of Febie Babyrose (born in 1985 in Jakarta, Indonesia), Herbert Hans Maruli (born in 1984 in Jakarta) and Ruddy Alexander Hatumena (born in 1984 in Bahrain). The young artists have had exhibitions, amongst other places, in Philadelphia, Singapore and Tokyo, and will be represented with up-coming projects in exhibitions and film festivals in Tel Aviv, Tallinn and Melbourne. (Cathérine Hug, trans. Gregory Siegl)