This is a lovely, long, challenging thing. As with a lot of nonverbal, conceptual art, it’s hard to keep up exactly with what is meaning which, when and where. That’s usually by design—I don’t know, what do you think the obelisk means? Hurray phenomenology, and having our own relationship with all the symbols in the glossary or the mythoquarium. But artists communicate too, or they should, if they want to be more than just hermetical, or do more than merely call attention to the workings and complexities of communication.
There went my two bits. All that being said, I think that Lodela is still pretty graspable. Multiply graspable, actually, which is to say that it’s subject to a number of cool interpretations. Are these cells dividing at conception? Is there an ante and post-natal component? Is there a paired archetypal journey, and then an after-life apotheosis? Is this a womb space, and then an earth space (with prominent participation by the moon), and then some kind of heavenly space?
There are lots of ideas here, or lots of productive interpretive directions that a viewer can go in. But it’s probably not quite right to approach this film from a purely conceptual standpoint. Here’s a thing. This is a man and a woman, and kind of disrobed at that. That has to be accounted for! The thing is, though, that there’s much more than just or even sensuality here. In fact, sensuality doesn’t seem to be the point at all. Rather, Lodela is filled with an instructive androgyny, maybe even zygotry. Could it be? Our divisions are often gendered, but our kindredness pre-exists and will outlast the mere battle of the sexes. And in the end, more than all of those possibilities and considerations, there’s a lot of tremendously choreographed and executed dance happening here.