For the second evening of our Film Festival we have the honor to present the film "WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND: a LOT-EK movie" produced and directed by Thomas Piper. Let's meet in TON 1 of Atelier Gardens. Thomas Piper will be with us, offering an introduction and responding to Q&A at the end of the movie.
If we pay enough attention to the ordinary, we see the extraordinary. The shipping
container is an accidental icon of our modern age: the eight-foot-by-forty-foot corrugated
steel box that brings the world to our doorstep. It brings all our hearts’ desires’, available
for purchase. And it brings us complicity in the global supply chains, and all the economic,
ecological, technological, and political systems that forge those chains, as those great
container ships link maker and user, buyer and seller, China and America together across
the vast distances of the lawless sea. The design studio LOT-EK is a visionary practice at
the intersection of art and architecture, that specializes in upcycling, which is the art and
science of repurposing, remaking, rethinking, reimagining. Of using old things in new ways.
The shipping container is the thing that has captured their imagination for over a
quarter-century: they have remade containers into homes, schools, galleries, libraries, and
more. With hundreds of millions of obsolete and unused containers around the world, this
is a new and necessary architecture of the future, that repairs and regenerates the
unnatural environment that we have inherited from the past. WE START WITH THE
THINGS WE FIND is a feature-length documentary of this vision, and of the soulful lifelong
partnership of the people, designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, behind it.
83 minutes // VO English + English subtitles // 2023
https://westartwiththethingswefind.com
