bathers leaving the Astoria pool

This video was shot in Astoria pool, on the last weekend of the NYC outdoor pools summer season 2022. It records the arrangement of space, the infrastructures and the (leisure) activity around and inside water. The music and the editing intervene in this everyday scene, and the performances that take place, until the pool closes for the day and for the season. Far from creating associations with specific characters, the camera angle and the blurriness of the image allow for a general observation of the people's movements, activities, roles and relations, while comment on the politics and ethics of filming in public space. 

Its title refers to Lumière brothers' first film, "Workers leaving the Lumière Factory", and is here associated with the modernist organisation -posterior to the creation of Lumière's film- of a day in "three eights" -8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure and 8 hours of sleep- that implied the planning of specific spaces for recreation, internationally. One of those was the Astoria Pool, the largest of the eleven WPA (Works Progress Administration) pools, built in New York, in 1936.

Link to the video: https://vimeo.com/dkondylatou/bathersleavingtheastoriapool?share=copy

Bathers leaving the Astoria Pool on the last weekend of the NYC outdoor pools summer season 2022 | HD video, loop, 04:48, color, stereo sound, 2023

Screenings: Closing Soon, 2023

Shootings for this video were made during my residency at ISCP in New York, with the support of ARTWORKS (Stavros Niarchos Foundation).