Film Categories: Anthropocene

  • Tërra Bëstia

    Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance. Its vivid gestures, suspended between the celestial and terrestrial realms, serve as a conduit for conveying the portents of humanity’s impending fate.

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Feet in Water, Head on Fire

    Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from West Asia flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire…

  • Research Garden: A Compendium of Lost Moments

    Full of lush shapes and vivid hues, this film loop was handcrafted using the techniques of phytography and optical printing. Raw visuals drawn from the artist’s garden over a period of two years bathe everything and everyone and confront us with silence. Vibrant leaf-prints, fingerprints, scratches and tape marks on celluloid work with the various phytographic offspring to evoke human entanglements with nature. With every touch of the hand or lamplight, these botanical image-traces are simultaneously illuminated and deteriorated. (text by Lesley Loksi Chan from the curatorial notes from Research garden: a compendium of lost moments)

  • As Grey Falls

    4k, colour, 22′ What touches us when we are amongst wild animals like the birds of the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia? They do not touch us physically. They seem, at best indifferent to our presence; perhaps they are annoyed. Do they even look at us when their gaze seems turned our way? We cannot know. Nonetheless we love these creatures, and hope that they will persist. “As Grey Falls” wanders delicately in the places these birds call home, wondering where a human’s place is in their worlds. “As Grey Falls” is a film of current urgency, now that…

  • Scenes from ‘Deseret’

    2-Channel video installation (2x4k, colour) Festival premiere: Ann Arbor Film Festival Designed as a 2-channel video installation for projection at large scale. Both channels are combined here in one widescreen image for streaming purposes. When watching on a computer, headphones are recommended for proper sound reproduction. “Scenes from Deseret” was initially inspired by two sources: the ever-changing landscape of the state of Utah in the US, and James Benning’s film about the state, “Deseret” (1995). The history of Utah recounted in Benning’s film ended in 1992. A lot has happened since that time, and I wanted to capture some of…

  • Wanderings through the delta

    2 x 2k or 4k video installation. Alternately available as a single channel program with both image tracks in one file. Colour. Run time 22′. Presented here with both channels combined into one stream. Ideal projection size: 2 x 8’x15′ or larger. Exhibition setup is flexible: ideal scenarios are a single long wall or two hanging screens either aligned in straight line or at an angle of approx. 120 degrees to each other. NOTE: This film has NO voiceover. The subtitles stand on their own and do not correspond to any recorded voice track. A film of current urgency, now…