She Who Passes Through Time

Nicole Hewitt

featuring Billie Grace, Vida Guzmić, Neža Knez, Nicole Hewitt

camera and sound Ivan Slipčević

editing Hrvoslava Brkušić

 

64’

16:9

Studio Pangolin 2026

 

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She Who Passes Through Time meanders and wanders through spaces, motions, characters, objects, voices and times drifting in an out of form. The film takes as its starting point the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic on which Tarkovksys Stalker is based. The film is organised around the minor character of Monkey –  a hairy and mutated little girl, the beloved daughter of the Stalker, working through notions of haunting and the politics of the minor, gender-inflected subject — the one who is absent, the one who mutates, transmigrates.

Filmed on location in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, it losely follows  the  shooting locations of Stalker as well as the locations of previously closed cities of Soviet time Baltics,  the film touches on the post-Soviet and post-totalitarian condition through the lens of decolonial thought, where the border and its zones is seen as a liminal field where temporalities, and histories remain unstable. Within this unstable terrain, time, memory, and postmemory collapse into one another — haunted by the ghosts of the present and the residues of multiple pasts and past futures.

The film is tentatively organised around Monkey and three interchangeable personas who travel, build, make objects/sets, support each other, circle each other and travel in loops, elipses and repetitions. It uses devices like the panning shot, unsynched sound, poetic mismathches to create a collage of fragments and sequences sometimes connected, sometimes not. In She Who Passes Through Time particular emphasis is placed on moments in which temporal relations, histories, modernities, futures, and totalities prove incommensurable, untranslatable, and unbridgeable — remaining unmetabolized and indigestible.

BIO

Nicole Hewitt is a visual artist working in film, video, installation, performance and text. Her work is concerned with memory, history and gendered narratives as mediated through technologies of representation and preservation. She has recently completed the long-term episodic series of performance/texts ‘This woman is called Jasna’ (2013-2021), her project Women Minor Speculations (2015-2021) continued research into the histories of South East Europe and forms of story-telling and she is currently developing a new long term project She Who Passes Through Time, Zones 1-3.

Her work has recently been shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Pogon Centre for Independent Culture, Zagreb; Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka; Invisible Savicenta – Savicenta; international festivals such as Days of Croatian Film, Hiroshima International Festival of Animation, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Festival of New Film Split, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF, New Media Festival Seoul, Mumbai International Film Festival, Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, etc. Retrospectives of her film, video and animation work were parts of Holland International Animation Film Festival Utrecht (2007) and ANIMATEKA (2006), Nicole Hewitt, Museums Quartier Vienna, 2004; Nicole Hewitt, Galerija Nova, Zagreb, 2004; UrbanFestival, Zagreb, 2011; Spaport Biennial 2009/2010, Banja Luka; Women With Vision, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 2008, Insert, Retrospective of Croatian Video Art, MSU, Zagreb, 2006; Here Tomorrow, MSU Zagreb, 2002., etc.).

Since 2017 she has been part of the performance collective Soundspiels (Vida Guzmić, Nicole Hewitt, Ivan Slipčević) working on projects exploring the borders of Europe, the material history of the Atlantic Wall and ideas about landscape and its construction. The project involves periods of walking and fieldwork on the margins of Europe.

Hewitt is cofounder of the artist run collective Studio Pangolin and teaches at The Department of New Media at The Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. Lives and works in Zagreb and London.

 

Fimography

Women Minor Speculations, 2021

This Woman is called Jasna 3/Ruins, 2016

This Woman is called Jasna 2 /Still Lives, 2015

This Woman is called Jasna / Images, 2015

In Time, 2008

In between, 2002 

Gloria, 2002 

In/Dividu, 1999 

Quell, 1997 

Single Viable Fetus, 1995 

Blue film, 1995 

Meat, 1991 

Notes on Continuity, 1991 

Herman’s Burden, 1989