SISTER CITY: An interview with Dani (Leventhal) ReStack
Dani (Leventhal) ReStack’s work is ferocious in every sense of the word. Largely pulled together from footage of her everyday life, ReStack’s discordant images and sounds are given shape in the edit, connections drawn by proximity as though they were constellations.
In Sister City, which is featured in this month’s D E E P Transmission, a thread of heroism and idealism exist side-by-side with malice and terror—banal images of a child in a Batman mask rub up against a harrowing story of sexual assault thwarted by an interloper. And in the mix, snatches of audio affirming the existence of God play next to fish for sale in a tank. A fireworks show is beautiful but wasteful and destructive, a place where communal, neighborly interactions can occur beneath the spectre of violence. This duality threads each image down to its title, as ReStack’s film envisions what a “sister city” could look like: a utopia constantly threatened from the outside.
ReStack graciously answered a few questions I had over email:
Sister City exists in a slippery realm — innocent images of children at play
are juxtaposed with stories of horrific cruelty, violent images feel
commonplace and banal. And even more alluring, mysterious images, like
a calming James Turrell blue that turns into a tank of jellyfish for sale,
reveal themselves to be threatening. How does representing these
opposing forces activate your work?
There are multiple stories happening. The boy in the tub is not the product of
rape, he is an upper class American white boy who will have a zillion
opportunities handed to him. The story on top of him belongs to a different
mother. But the rape can happen to anyone and I’m questioning the fate of the offspring.
The Turrell space is one of possibilities. Is there a god? Seems to me the
ocean world is proof, but when we reduce the animals to a product for sale, I
wonder if it’s true. Humans are also the glorious animals, but could there be god when we are so sick? So greedy…
You shoot and edit your own work, largely featuring people you know,
capturing an intimacy that feels unparalleled: devastating little moments
pile up and collide into each other. Can you talk a bit about the formal
qualities you’ve developed, specifically your associative styles of
cinematography and cutting, and how the two echo off one another?
I guess montage with no transition effects mirrors reality. At least it does mine.
One moment is a bliss of connection with someone I love. The next, that very
person stabs me emotionally. JUMP CUTS.
While many of the artists featured on D E E P tend to be young,
emerging, or even completely outside the art market, your work has been
featured at prestigious venues such as Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1,
Rotterdam, and more. Yet for me, I found you online, as I find most
everything for the show, hitting me fresh with little context for where it
comes from. Why is it important for you to host so much of your work
publicly online? Do you find that this helps with increasing access to what
you do?
The Bread and Puppet Theater Company has a “D E E P” impact on my thinking. They insist that art be cheap.
Their refusal to participate in corrupt capitalism influences my decision to put
work online.
Why would someone edition a video ? ! ?
Of course I want to sell stuff. I have a kid to put through school, and just today we had a flood in the bedroom that buckled the wood of the floor $ $ $
And I do try to sell drawings, but those can’t be reproduced.
Thanks for the questions Chris.
It’s an honor to participate in D E E P.
See more of ReStack’s work over at her website: danirestack.com.
Sister City is currently streaming as part of Transmission 8 on Memory until September 17th.
