DARK SUN SQUEEZE — PAWEŁ WOJTASIK

DARK SUN SQUEEZE

2003 · 10 minutes · SD video, 24p

Directed, filmed, and edited by Paweł Wojtasik

Dark Sun Squeeze gives sustained attention to vast expanses of moving material—its density, color, surface, rhythm, and transformation. Without human figures or an explanatory framework to organize the image, what appears before the camera remains uncertain: physical yet abstract, familiar yet difficult to identify. The film asks what remains when we look past familiar categories such as filth, disgust, and utility, and simply attend to what is there.

About the Film

Dark Sun Squeeze was filmed inside a sewage treatment plant, although the film does not identify the location or explain what is being shown. There are no human figures and no narration. The camera remains with surfaces, currents, accumulations, and changing states of matter.

The work began as an inquiry into perception: how recognition alters what we see, how judgment enters an image, and what may become visible before familiar categories take hold. At the same time, it turns the question toward the observer: what is the self that looks, and is it as solid and separate from the world as it ordinarily appears?

The material is encountered first through movement, color, density, light, and sound. Seen from a distance, it can appear expansive, luminous, even generative; closer views reveal its physical nature more insistently. The film does not try to resolve the tension between attraction and repulsion. Instead, it remains with that tension, allowing what is usually hidden or rejected to become the object of sustained attention.

Writing on the Film

Holland Cotter, “No Return,” The New York Times, October 1, 2004

“Paweł Wojtasik, however, delivers the final word on the absolute value of news, money, politics and just about everything else. His short film Dark Sun Squeeze documents, close up, the workings of a sewage treatment plant as it processes human waste. Filtered through technology and art, excrement gleams and shines.”

Read the archived review (PDF)

Sarah Kessler, catalogue text for Greater New York 2005, MoMA PS1, 2005

Kessler situates Dark Sun Squeeze within your broader investigation of how waste is processed and removed from everyday awareness. She describes the film’s movement from distant views of glittering, bubbling sewage to graphic close-ups, and interprets this shift as a trajectory from apparent purity toward visible contamination. She also notes that the work can be presented as either a single-channel or three-channel projection.

Read the catalogue text (PDF)

Vincent Meessen, “A Short History of Decay,” 2005

Meessen considers the film’s transformation of an industrial waste-treatment site into a charged visual field. He emphasizes the absence of human figures, the tension between aesthetic attraction and discomfort, and the larger cultural meanings of waste, purity, hygiene, and rejection.

Read the essay (PDF)