Marta Sundmann

BHV, 2025
film 10’00’’, (archival footage and AI)

“Fiction is not a means of expression. Images should be grounded in existing material.”

-Vows of Presence, 2025

“BHV” is a 10 minute video work based on the reconstruction of everyday spaces from the late 1990s and early 2000s. At its center is the memory of Beverly Hills Video, a rental store that returns as a point of reference for both personal memory and a broader cultural ritual.

The film follows the principles of the manifesto Vows of Presence, inspired by Dogma 95, moving away from conventional narrative in favor of immediacy and the physical presence of the camera. Artificial intelligence tools are used not as a visual effect, but as a medium for emotional reconstruction and the materialization of memory.

The work unfolds as an attempt to capture the moment between experience and its recording. I am interested in a condition in which memory is not a stable archive, but a process of continuous transformation and reconstruction. The images do not recreate the past in a linear way, but build it through fragments, repetitions, and shifts.

A key element is the relationship between the image and the body. The camera does not function as an observational tool, but as a device of presence, moving close to the surface of things, at the level of gesture and detail. In this way, the film restores the physical dimension of experience that was once central to video rental culture.

The video also operates as a reflection on changing modes of image consumption. The transition from physical media to digital distribution has led to the disappearance of rituals associated with watching. “BHV” does not attempt to reconstruct them directly, but to reactivate them through the structure of the film.

The project is part of a broader interest in the relationship between technology and memory. The use of artificial intelligence makes it possible to generate images that do not exist as documents, but as simulations of experience. In this sense, the film exists on the threshold between reconstruction and fiction, leaving the viewer uncertain about the status of the image.