Tanja Bombach’s nightmarish short film ‘Alow’ premieres with live music at Trauma

Following the premiere at Trauma in Berlin, we caught up with Artistic Director Tanja Bombach to learn how she enlisted designers to realise her vision

Raised in a small village in East Germany, Tanja Bombarch moved to Berlin 11 years ago to pursue a career that embraces her creative prowess. Whilst Bombarch’s background resides is in fashion industry, Bombarch’s talents are multidisciplinary with practices dancing on the fringes of performance, music and film.

More recently, she has been focusing her energy on artistic direction after founding her “transdisciplinary” project series Catalogue of Disguise (COD) in 2018. The project aims to invite performance artists, sound artists, designers and the audience alike to renegotiate who they are and to support Berlin’s creative scene. “COD deals with choreographed identities in times of the internet and escapism, which I translated into performances, installations, and videos throughout the years”, she explained.

On 22 June, COD celebrated the premiere of its latest film project: Alow at Trauma, Berlin. It’s a fashion-forward production filled with spellbinding dancing and music that makes it hard to look away from the screen. The film encompasses the works of three young and independent designers – one of those being Bombarch, and the other two Laura Gerte and Don Aretino.

The film will be presented throughout the festival season and has not only been selected by the Burbank International Film Festival in the US, but it has also won an award at the 18th ReelHeART Film and Screenplay Festival in Toronto, Canada. We caught up with Bombach after the Berlin premiere to find out more.

ABOVE
Fashion – Laura Gerte

Congratulations on the premiere of Alow last month! How did it go?

The premiere went well! It was amazing to have most of the team present and to celebrate with them. Together with Simone Antonioni, the composer of the score, we created an immersive sound installation inspired by Alow at Trauma. Since the film was also shot there, it felt like you were already part of the narrative even before the screening.

Why did you choose to present the film at Trauma?

When Trauma was brought to life, and I started working there with the idea of creating fashion projects, I quickly moved into making bigger productions with a more interdisciplinary approach. I always worked at the intersection of different disciplines, so this came naturally to me. Trauma facilitated the right environment for this, from the equipment to the possibility of working with the space itself. Since Alow is a multidisciplinary production, Trauma seemed like the perfect fit.

ABOVE
Fashion – Laura Gerte

It’s such a cathartic feeling to witness everything finally coming together! Looking back to where it all began, what initially got the ball rolling?

Alow is the fourth project of the Catalogue of Disguise series, and I have been working on it since 2019. During the pandemic, things got postponed and I made a smaller video production in between called Haze, which examines reflections of the existing conditions of 2020 in a fragmented way, combining arthouse, fashion, and mainstream culture. That definitely influenced the process of Alow afterwards.

Usually, I start a project by conceptualising the main vision and collecting ideas for it before I begin putting the team together and working very closely with sound artists, fashion designers, choreographers and dancers. In the case of Alow, my vision was loosely inspired by the cyberpunk novel Vurt (1993) by Jeff Noon with its dark and nightmarish mood. The story describes different dream worlds, which you can choose to enter. These immersive journeys with the underlying wish for escapism turn into experiencing a fickle and unsettling relationship with reality.

ABOVE
Fashion – Don Aretino

Fashion dominates in this short film. Was this a purposeful decision?

Certainly, this was an intentional decision. The project series draws elements from fashion to question how truth can be found in disguise and the psychology of dressing up. Self-presentation, a negotiation or dialogue between self-identity and the social realm, becomes a constant performance in our digital life.

It’s about how a dress tells a story; how a piece of clothing becomes the frame of a new narrative while questioning who we are and what disguises mean to us. The idea was to create a shared experience that evolves around fashion to shape a cultural perception of it by dissolving the borders with other disciplines.

But in the end, each discipline is equally important as the next. It’s a non-hierarchical approach, where every aspect is crucial – sound as much as fashion as much as performance – like for example a Monet painting, where colour, composition and form are equally essential for the overall experience of the work.

ABOVE
Fashion – Don Aretino

How did you go about selecting designers to breathe life into your vision?

The designers were already part of it from an early stage. I selected them based on their strong aesthetics, and whether the designs already inhabited a paradoxical character in some way, which I could incorporate into the dream world I had already imagined.

I wanted the collections to be as juxtaposing as possible, so each “room ” (as we called it within the team) has its own world with characters. For example, Laura Gerte’s aesthetic of her outfits already had this association with bodybuilders, but with the twist of historical references. It fitted very well with my vision, and I immediately thought of movements and music to accompany that.

How essential is fashion in film?

Much like music can complete a visual narrative and bring the viewer’s overall experience to a
complete aesthetic happening… So does fashion, perhaps in a more subtle way, yet its involvement is absolutely crucial and telling of many aspects that can’t come across in any other way.

ABOVE
Fashion – Don Arentino

Are there any directors who you would consider have made a lasting impression on your work?

There are quite a few, but Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Derek Jarman have all influenced me a lot. Especially Kurosawa’s understanding of movement and working with it was very inspiring. For Alow, I was inspired in particular by the intensity and immersion that Gaspar Noe creates in his films. And by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, regarding how the music and score communicated most of the film, as there were barely any dialogues.

ABOVE
Fashion – Tanja Bombarch

Are you wrapped up with Alow for now? If so, is there anything exciting on the horizon?

The film is still running through the festival season. We will release the soundtrack of Alow under the independent Berlin-based record label Verlag later this year, which I’m really looking forward to. And otherwise, yes, there are for sure new things already in the planning at the moment.

For those wanting to see the short film, where can they catch it?

There will be a public screening in the Autumn in Berlin. A date is not set in stone yet, but we will announce it via the Catalogue of Disguise Instagram account, so keep an eye out for that.