Kalina Nedelcheva
OCAD University, Toronto, Canada
“Counting Drops” is an audio-visual sensory poem that explores themes of intimacy, sexuality, and love through symbols, gestures, and textures. The experimental film’s three cantos depict different relationships to love—sensual love, sustainable love and heartbreak, and self-love, respectively. The first canto, filmed in Cape Chignecto Provincial Park (Nova Scotia), is a visual sequence of the awakening body as it morphs into the sensual shapes and textures of cliffs at low tide. The second canto, shot at Tommy Thomson Park (Toronto), works through themes of sustainable romantic love and growing apart on the background of the industrial lakeside. The third canto, filmed in the artist’s bathtub, presents a more contained picture of self-discovery and confronting the practice of self-love on a deeply intimate level.
Each canto is accompanied by music that translates the visual sequence into a deeply reflective and meditative sound experience. With close collaborators Victor Ostrovsky and Marilyn Yogarajah, the artist scored the film through improvisation, which was guided by the images appearing on the screen in real-time. This facilitates deep affective synergies between the visual and auditory experience of “Counting Drops.” The artists used a variety of instruments like singing bowls, a violin, harps, synths, rain sticks, and percussion for the soundtrack.
Gestures, symbols, and textures play pivotal parts in the multi-sensory experience, while the accompanying ambient music immerses the viewer in a state of meditation. Water unites the three cantos as a sustaining, life-giving force and a marker of comfort, richness, and a return to purity. “Counting Drops” is a ballad to the human relationship to self, to others, and to nature.
