Esther Urlus embodies the ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to filmmaking. In her work, mainly on 16mm film, she draws inspiration from old or obsolete techniques from the history of film and photography. For Deletion, she drew inspiration from the autochrome process: a forgotten method of creating colour from black-and-white images whereby tiny grains of potato starch, coloured in red-orange, blue-violet and green, create the illusion of a colour image. This potato starch generated colour by overlaying a grainy pattern of the three primary colours (RGB) onto a black-and-white image. This technique is magnified in Deletion, making it seem as if you are looking at the image through a microscope: rustling grains in which only contours are visible, and forms that only partially recognisable, resembling the remnants of a human body.
