The escalating climate crisis is making visible what was always true: no neat boundary exists between human and more-than-human worlds. “Nature” is a social fiction turned material fact, used to justify everything from resource extraction to wilderness preservation to racial hierarchies. The land and organisms we shape become the contours of our world. They form the basis of all sustenance, imprint themselves in our psyches, undergird the built environment, and enliven cultural narratives. This 90-minute collection of experimental media explores the bio-geo-social lives of the land and its actors, both human and more-than, through a range of experimental approaches, including meditation, animation, documentation, collage, and performance.
$5-10 sliding scale, no one turned away
PROGRAM:
Grassland Sarah Kanouse, 2019, 19:20
Grassland excavates the stratigraphic layers of belief, ecology, practice, and geology that form a northeastern Colorado landscape. Meditative original footage of the grassland merges with handmade collage animation in a poetic and unsettling portrait of place.
The Bear in the Valley Deke Weaver, 2019, 38:00
Why do we always put ourselves in the picture? Human beings are drawn to powerful places, but most of us don’t have the patience to learn from them. A cinematic essay of selfie sticks, climate collapse, ecotourism, seeing, and the sublime: a wry call to arms.
In The Tree Anna Luisa Petrisko, 2017, 3:48
In The Tree explores a liminal body and its connection to nature, specifically trees, and how the lifeforce of trees and humans are interconnected. This video is part of a body of work by the artist Anna Luisa Petrisko that explores the body as a spaceship, and how—through otherworldly concepts, science fiction, and holistic healing practices—we can not only imagine and achieve transcension, but also find new ways to heal the marginalized body.
Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic Annapurna Kumar, 2017, 3:08
Small pieces of information can be stored separately within a shared container. The most efficient containers can house multiple pieces of information in the same location, intersecting from different angles.
Double Blind Julia Hechtman, 2017, 2:35
Double Blind superimposes super-8 film on mini-dv of the same locations in New Orleans. What results is an uncanny visual, supported by audio that is both of sounds from the swamp and a film projector.
Feral Utopias Corinne Teed, 2015, 7:00
Feral Utopias is an animation created from recordings of LGBTQ subjects and scans of 19th century wood engravings by colonial naturalists, collaging portraits with appropriated etchings, to create a hybrid, speculative world. This resulting otherworldly space immerses us in multi-voiced narratives that reveal utopic, interspecies alliances amidst the dystopic realities of America as a settler colonial landscape.
The Mighty Tacoma Vanessa Renwick, 2011, 9:11
Mighty Tacoma opens with the song of a cello at dawn that tapers off to a foghorn wail. The sun rises to greet Mount Rainier, highest peak of the Cascade Range and originally named Tacoma, or Tahoma. The majestic and melancholy score remains in the foreground of the film, as it shifts between images of industrial machinery with the Olympics in the background. A beautiful, modern poem of a film that ends with the promise of some passing orcas, wolves of the sea.