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SIMPLE THINGS 
2024
4K video | 2.39:1 | 7.15 min. | color | sound


Simple Things begins with a modest gesture: A young girl draws fine black lines on a white, circular disc. This elementary action unfolds upon a form deeply embedded in the symbolic history of humanity—the circle, emblem of infinity, unity, and harmony. Within this quiet yet playful act, multiple semantic layers overlap: The geometric clarity evokes the formal language of arts and architecture, while the act of drawing itself recalls the contemplative practice of East Asian calligraphy. Form and inscription thus appear as universal cultural achievements of humankind. Yet Simple Things does not remain on the level of formalism. With a quiet radicality, the film proposes a transformation in which cultural symbolism is translated into a natural cycle: monkeys’ hands reach for the drawings, and the discs—metaphors of human cultural history—become nourishment for the animals of the natural world, appropriated and transformed. This pivotal scene articulates a subtle image of symbolic redistribution, in which eating emerges simultaneously as an act of destruction and incorporation. The distinction between nature and culture—long upheld within Western thought as a fundamental dividing line—begins to dissolve. The playful pleasure of creation merges almost immediately into decay: Nothing remains untouched, no disc is preserved; everything is consumed, integrated, and carried forward. In this way, Simple Things reveals a palpable joy—crystallized in the girl’s liberating laughter at the film’s conclusion, rendering the relationship between culture, nature, and meaning not as a fixed opposition, but as a mutable, porous field of relations.



Directed / Camera / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Composition & Sound Design: Natalia Dominguez Rangel
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Sound Editing: Nigel Brown
Production Assistant: Barbara Walkowiak
Supported by: Federal State of Austria



︎ Archive Film