LongStory

About/ In a little more detail

Becalelis Brodskis / AKA Existentialsitcom
About
bec red boiler lieing

FICTIONALISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY WITH A TRAGIC SENSE OF HUMOUR

Being brought up between the uk and Morocco amongst artists from different disciplines and cultures, Becalelis’s influences are diverse.

His work includes films, Sculptures, books, maps , and large-scale community arts projects alongside an academic career and large scale community arts projects

In 2024, after 8 years of research, Brodskis completed his doctoral thesis in mapping and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Recognised by esteemed professors as an original contribution to knowledge, the research was placed on a digital library to gather pixelated dust. A nervous breakdown followed, then a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and a return to being a full-time artist.

The Mulberry Tree is the result of Brodskis’s exodus from academia and the label of bipolar — facing the monster and liberating his research from its confining structures. Returning to the anima of art — making — to breathe life into it, he now lives art as a ritual device for expanded animation.

Artistic background

Rewind

Born in London in 1968, his film The Father, the Ram, My Dad and Me describes how his parents met. His mother was a painter of Scottish and Orcadian heritage, trained by Kossoff and Michael Andrews at the Slade. She met his father, of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, in Morocco. Leaving Morocco, his father worked with French and German independent filmmakers, including as first assistant director to Wim Wenders.

Still from animation of young boy holding hand of his father with his mother in the background waving from a tower
A childhood between different European countries, Morocco and India. Moving between very different cultures, cities, countryside, religions and cults.

Returning to England as a teenager, he left school at 15, got a BA in sculpture from Norwich School of Art in 1988, followed by training as a traditional stonecarver with John Roberts.

Alongside his work he has always been politically active. In 1997, after an extended period of direct action saving trees and community assets in South London, he had his first major breakdown. His recovery through drawing led him into animation, completing an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2001. His films have been selected for international festivals and toured with the British Film Council. In 2002, The Father , the ram, my dad and me was awarded the prestigious FIPRESCI Prize by the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Later work was selected for festivals including Sundance, USA.

In 2010, he was commissioned to make Burrow for the inaugural ICCI 360 Festival, creating a 360 animation without the technologies that would later make 360 film production widely available. The work was part of one of his other dominant themes, Climbing & Digging, related to his graphic novel Jacob and the Angel, drawing on the biblical story also explored by the mystic artist William Blake.

Alongside his artistic career, Brodskis spent many years teaching and working in higher education, including senior academic roles such as Head of Department of Animation at LCC and Plymouth College of Art. His socially engaged work developed alongside this career, often in tension with the institutional frameworks in which he was working.

THE THREAD
Before the exodus, before the PhD, Brodskis received a substantial Arts Council grant to produce Re-imagine Your Town, a participatory arts project at the forefront of using game engines and VR for community mapping. Different artists were commissioned to engage residents in a psychogeography of their town, proposing an alternative to the council town plan.
re imagine vr
Research
This led to his PhD, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His research focused on Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, adopting his theories of perception alongside Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and methods of mapping psychogeographies. He applied these theories and practices to his own ritual uncoiling of a spool of golden thread between points of GPS data. The outcome is a diagram derived from a method of mapping reality that adjusts how we understand and define reality.
A CGI 3D sureal image of a flying bus shaped like a gold fish over a townscape
Exodus
A research post was awarded on the strength of his PhD, although it bore no relation to his art or thesis. Commuting to an office in a science park with children to feed, the lure of a regular income diverted attention from a looming existential shadow. A purgatory which only demons can scale was then pierced by the blade of a nervous breakdown. Escaping with this demonic ally into the mountains of the Alpujarras, the landscape where the mulberry tree stands, a movement of exodus began.
untitled 1
Straight Ahead Running Away.
On a street corner in London, a gift of a sketchbook transformed into the prize-winning animation Straight Ahead Running Away. A film made on endless train journeys, escaping family ruptures in Cornwall for a sanctuary on the East Coast of England. Watching suns rise and set, extending into the space between contours of washed-up pebbles, drawing returned as a daily practice and lifeline. Continuing with autobiography, a central theme in his work, video diaries documenting a creative recovery turned into Existential Sitcom. There is nothing more serious than humour.
Untitled 01 Manifesto
Bezalel
In June 2025, Brodskis, in a recurring state of existential collapse, had no option but to resign from his post as a university researcher. For the sake of sanity, he re-vowed to return without compromise to being a full-time artist. Returning to the Alpujarras, the taste of the fruit of the black mulberry tree reminded him of an ancestral association with his namesake Bezalel, the master artisan who crafted a portable temple for a nomadic culture in exodus. Highly skilled in traditional stonecarving, animation and teaching, and drawn towards religious iconography and esoteric symbolism, he took on the artisan dress of a red boiler suit and the role of the artist as mystic fool.
tree man panel
The Mulberry Tree
In July 2026, on a third visit to the mulberry tree, the silkworm dragon revealed its head, its golden thread wrapped around the branches. From the dragon’s breath came the instruction to release his research from academia’s confines and request the manna of patrons who provide the independence to take liberty, as fools do, with sacred images, hierarchies and taboos.
dragon mulberry landscape
Existential Sitcom
Having dedicated what is left of this time to a ritual practice of making art, The Mulberry Tree is not a departure from the knowledge of the thesis. It expresses that knowledge through the making of art as a socially engaged practice. The participatory map of portals in time and space and the film, The Mulberry Tree and the Taste of its Fruit, bring together the ideas of Bergson and Debord with the ritual that was behind the thesis but could not be fully admitted within it.
A man with a clapper board saying existential sitcom
Existential Sitcom

The map will be made from the outcomes of workshops and published, with a limited edition made in gold thread available to patrons of the project. The film will be submitted to festivals and screened internationally. In the meantime, the existential sitcom of its making will be posted on social media outlets, in the hope that it encourages manna to fall.

Contact

To get in touch

  • brodskis@gmail.com
  • At the crossroads