MARFA
(on Super8)
Earlier this year, a collaborator and I spent a few days in Marfa, shooting on Super 8 for a project
Marfa doesn’t meet you halfway. It pulls you in for its solitude, its art — the Chinati Foundation, Judd Foundation, Prada Marfa — and the strange distortion of time that lingers here. The horizon feels endless. Wide streets hold more sky than buildings. A single car passes; the sound disappears before you can turn your head.
The people are few, but each one feels chosen — handpicked by the town itself. The landscape stretches so far your mind eventually stops trying to measure it. Here, art feels inseparable from the desert, as if the land commissioned every piece 🏜
Locals talk about the push and pull — the beauty, the closures, the rising costs, the fragility of building anything this far out. People leave, the solitude deepens, and somehow that feels like part of the point.
When our Super 8 📽 came back from the lab, half the footage was gone — frames that never made it through. At first, it felt like a loss. But then I thought of Marfa — how what’s missing is just as much a part of it as what’s there. So, we made what survived its own thing. Incomplete, but somehow more itself for it…