LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE

Every minute, a myriad of videos are posted online on TikTok before disappearing in the platform’s constant flow. Momentarily, Little Poems in Prose interrupts this movement. Using material found on TikTok, Radu Jude and Andrei Rus compose seven small collections that extract these fragments from the algorithmic traffic to present them to the viewer under different conditions, making it possible to perceive the recurrences and operations that the flow tends to dissolve.

Jude has been exploring the critical possibilities of archives for a long time now. In films such as The Dead Nation (2017), The Exit of the Trains (2020), Caricaturana (2021) and Eight Postcards from Utopia (2024), the appropriated images stop being stable documents and are turned into areas of confrontation where the political tensions of a society emerge. Little Poems in Prose is a prolongation of this research, now involving an archive without a centre, constantly expanding, whose organisational principles remain, for the most part, hidden.

In the style of certain 20th century artistic practices that found a principle of organisation in fluke, the film takes as its starting point source material whose logic it does not fully grasp. Here, algorithmic flow functions as a kind of contemporary noise: a mass of images from which emerge, through accumulation, unexpected motifs. The act of selection is less about imposing a meaning than revealing certain patterns.

It is significant that, among the countless forms circulating on the platform, Jude and Rus choose a very specific family of images – images that form part of a grotesque imagination. There is nothing arbitrary about this choice. No aesthetic better expresses, through the coexistence of violence and comical disinhibition, the tensions running through today’s societies. Caricature, dark humour, scatology and obscenity belong as much to TikTok’s repertoire as they do to the repertoire of artists - like Jude and Rus - very much of their time.
Manuel Asin