A note from the Lab on Marietta Schwarz and Katja Izmestyeva's Flying Seeds, Captured Clouds: twenty-five minutes beside Christiane Löhr, a sculptor who builds with what the wind carries.
The Gathering
The film opens on a wall covered with small loops of horsehair and closes in an empty room, where a man cleans the floor before the public arrives. In between is the work of Christiane Löhr, which Marietta Schwarz and Katja Izmestyeva follow at close range: horsehair, reed seeds, seed heads, ivy fruits. These are things we pay no attention to, elements we find in nature that rarely catch our eye. We may even step on some of them as we walk. Yet Löhr has built around them a line of research like no other. She holds them, looks at them closely, tells them apart by colour and thickness. Her work began this way, with the hair of her own horse, which at some point she could no longer bring herself to throw away, and with the idea of building from what belongs to everyday life.
Gathering tells its own story, while she follows its natural course and accompanies it through the process. A seed head picked in Prato at the end of August keeps opening inside a box, and every time the box is opened it is full again. Then the same down reaches the wall. Löhr presses it by hand inside a ring of needles, settles it with a fine point, and on the white wall a dense disc of seeds remains: a cushion, as she calls it.
The Right Size
Löhr's works are modest in size. The film conveys the sense of the process and of how a work comes into being, as it really happens. Löhr recalls the frustration of her early years, when her materials imposed a precise scale while those around her were working big. Then she understood that this was her path, and that these objects find their strength when they occupy the right place in the room.
The directors chose the same measure. Katja Izmestyeva, who also shot the film, keeps the camera at the height of the needles set into the wall, of horsehair stretched from pin to pin, of a pencil hanging from a thread above a ring of pins. Löhr's hands often fill the whole frame. It is a way of giving body to an idea the film leaves to the artist to say: the hands know how materials should be handled. The editing, signed by both, gives every gesture the time it needs.
The two authors bring two different ways of looking. Marietta Schwarz trained as an architect and has long had a passion for nature and gardening. Katja Izmestyeva comes from literature and film studies, with long experience as an editor and her own body of documentary and fiction work. The film carries both: the eye of someone who measures space and the eye of someone who stays close to bodies and gestures. The last words belong to Lisa Tucci Russo, one of Löhr's gallerists, and they speak of construction and architecture.
From Studio to Gallery
The film began with an encounter. Marietta Schwarz first saw Löhr's work in 2021, in the exhibition Ordnung der Wildnis at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. A few years later, an exhibition at the Museum Lothar Fischer in Neumarkt, Bavaria, became the occasion to look for answers to the questions those works had left her with: how they are made, what shaped the artist's way of seeing, in what conditions she works. With Katja Izmestyeva those questions became a film made by four hands. The shoot took them to Italy too, where Löhr spends part of her time and is represented by the gallery Studio Trisorio.
Löhr works between Cologne and Tuscany. From the window of her Italian studio the film frames the Rocca di Cerbaia, the castle of the Alberti counts in the Val di Bisenzio, tied to a legend about Dante. At that table she makes the pencil drawings she has pursued since the 1990s: the lines divide the sheet and press into it until a relief appears on the back. She also describes a habit: she leaves her works in the studio while they are still uncertain, and when she returns her mind is ready to see where the mistake was or where the work wanted to go.
Then the film returns to the white rooms, among ladders, scaffolding and a hammer setting needles into the wall one at a time. Alongside Löhr speak two gallerists who work with her, Werner Klein and Lisa Tucci Russo.
The film reached Naples by a clear route. In 2020 Löhr showed at Studio Trisorio and, in the Incontri sensibili series, at the Museo di Capodimonte. In 2022 she opened the project wall of the gallery's new space on Capri. (To learn more about the gallery and its artists, see the curated path dedicated to Studio Trisorio.) Flying Seeds, Captured Clouds had its Italian premiere at Artecinema on 12 October 2025, at the Teatro Augusteo.
Why We Are Hosting This Film
The film gives its subject the same care Löhr gives her materials. It slows down, stays close, lets a minimal gesture carry its full weight. It is also a film born alongside an exhibition, outside the market. It is signed by two authors who came to cinema by different roads: Marietta Schwarz from radio and architecture, with her first documentary, and Katja Izmestyeva from literature and editing, with the camera in her hands.
We like that it shows the work an exhibition usually hides: the ladders, the hands, the needles counted one by one, the floor washed before opening. And we are drawn to the question it leaves open, the same one that runs through Löhr's work: how much weight and value we give to a work made of materials bound to change and wear away over time. Horsehair, seeds and stalks do not last like bronze or marble, and their ephemeral nature is as much a part of the work as its form. This is why a film about an artist can itself become a way of keeping her work.
Flying Seeds, Captured Clouds now has a home here, in our [Art & Moving Image] collection.
In From the Sky to the Wall, fourteen frames from the film trace a trajectory from the sky to the wall.
Credits
FLYING SEEDS, CAPTURED CLOUDS (Flug Samen Varianten)
Directed and edited by Marietta Schwarz and Katja Izmestyeva
Cinematography by Katja Izmestyeva
Colour grading by Stephan Knauss
Sound editing by Ben Kinder
Music by Marietta Schwarz
[Germany / Germany, Italy], 2025, 25 min
With the kind support of Museum Lothar Fischer, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz; Galleria Tucci Russo; Galerie Werner Klein; Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Stills from the film, courtesy of Marietta Schwarz and Katja Izmestyeva.
Watch
Now streaming: Flying Seeds, Captured Clouds, Marietta Schwarz and Katja Izmestyeva
