Seven Types of Sea is a collaboration between filmmaker, visual artist and archivist Jasper Rigole and musicians Thomas Smetryns, Marieke Berendsen and Jacob Vanneste.
The project is a film screening with live music, the blueprint for a film in the making.The project uses footage from the IICADOM archive (The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other people's Memories) founded by Rigole. This archive consists of an extensive collection of home movies, mostly on 8mm and super8, found over the years at flea markets and garage sales. The music is a combination of pre-composed parts and various improvisation techniques and strategies informed by the chosen fragments.
Seven Types of Sea starts from the observation that the sea plays a very central role in this archive partly because the film material was mainly shot during holidays, where the sea is often an important destination. In addition, we can also note that the sea has a special attraction for many amateur filmmakers, which transcends the recreational aspect. Consequently, we get to see not only the typical days at the seaside, but also some poetic interpretations of the sea in its other guises (the impetuous, the endless, the mysterious sea, …)

The artistic point of departure for this project is Rigole’s observation that in cataloging the images, he uses many different categories, archetypes and keywords in an attempt to name the images of the sea and to distinguish them from each other. In this way, an idiosyncratic system, a personal idiom, emerges. The resulting taxonomic vertigo is the archivist's true challenge. After all, isn't every division absurd and don’t we always invoke arbitrary and hypothetical classifications? The poetic creative drive with which the amateur creates his images is mirrored in the archivist's cataloging gaze.

After All, not every sea is the same. The breakwater, the spring tide, the sea foam, La mer gelé. These are all specific denominations with only one interpretation. There are dunes, dikes and promenades. The jetty is not the pier, the water barrier is not the dam, the quay is not the breakwater. Not even the proverbial shore. We visit the fishing port, the marina, the terminal, the jetty ... When does a boat become a ship? What is the difference between a fishing boat, a sailing ship, a sloop, a dinghy, a kayak, a canoe, a zodiac, a yacht, a catamaran or an optimist?

Premiered at Monikino Festival, September 2023, KAAP, Oostende