Daria Blum (4D)
I make videos, I compose sound and music, and I perform. My work is about addiction, habit, obsession, love, sex and power. It is mainly autobiographical. Two artists I admire at the moment are Ann Hirsch and Ragnar Kjartansson, but more than anything else, it’s my own life and my own relationships that influence me. I’m really attracted to nineties and noughties chart hits. I’ll become obsessed with a single song, and earworm, and this can form the basis for an entire work, just like Saturday Night by Whigfield did.
My current project is a film which contains a lot of nudity and pornography. It might be all about me, but it might also be about my mother. I’ll know once I’ve finished the first rough cut.
I spend less time shooting and recording, than I do editing. I like to recycle older, saved material, and figure things out while I add or discard, layer and shift elements around. My pieces don’t progress linearly but, as I develop them, they expand in various directions. I like to utilize short music samples to create soundscapes for my films, and I often allow the sound to determine the imagery, rather than the other way around.
I think travel broadens the mind? After my Erasmus semester at KABK in The Hague, Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands, I spent the summer at home in Switzerland and in Italy. Now I’m back at CSM and have reconnected with my inner Eurobitch, which means I’ve just been making work that is fucking fantastic.