November 3–25 | Wed–Sat 12–5pm
Exhibition @ Deluge
Territorial Imperative
Territorial Imperative explores issues around ecology, colonialism, commodified landscapes and interspecies communication with media installations by Sarah Ballard, Big Top Collective, Yusuf Demirors, Kimberly Forero-Arnías, Janelle VanderKelen and Sebastian Wiedemann. The six works presented here—all made on analog, celluloid film—engage with imperialist motivations, the environmental effects of late capitalism, traditional ecological knowledge and the regenerative power of nature.
Heat Spells
Sarah Ballard | 2023 | USA | 9 min
Heat Spells identifies tourism as the eternal reenactment of manifest destiny and the Fountain of Youth as a myth that underwrites the American dream. As myth and history conflate to obscure the imperialist motivations behind Ponce de Leon, the film responds by embodying feverish experience of the “explorer’s” search for eternal youth, an act which parallels the compulsory capture inherent in tourist photography.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator whose work concerns hauntological subjects—afterimages of colonialism, ghosts of the working class and political residues of hysteria. Her work has screened at festivals such as Crossroads, Antimatter, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival and Montreal Independent Film Festival. She is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and received her MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts.
garden path
Big Top Collective | 2023 | Canada | 3 min
garden path dives deeply into a meditative engagement with the forest. Shot on black and white 16mm film and hand processed with coffee-based eco-developer, the film is the first part of Big Top’s new project Wild Forest, underlining the regenerative power of nature to offer hope in the face of climate change. The soundtrack features the voices of Big Top Collective members in overlapping vocal harmony.
Big Top Collective is Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark. Their media works often combine imagery captured from various sources while walking through forests, gardens or while travelling and feature gestural camera movements and hand painted film transformed in the post-production process via layering and abstraction. Trace Nelson is a multidisciplinary artist working in visual and media art and music who has exhibited her work in Canada, the USA and Europe. She has worked as an art educator over the past 28 years, teaching at Concordia University, Vancouver Island School of Art and the University of Victoria. Peter Sandmark has been creating single channel experimental film works since 1978. He has taught various filmmaking and film studies courses at Concordia University and the University of Victoria. Sandmark has also worked for media art centres in Canada such as Main Film and IMAA in Montreal and FLUX media gallery in Victoria. Nelson and Sandmark live and work in Victoria on the uncededed territory of the Lekwungen peoples.
Suya Dokun [Touch the Water]
Yusuf Demirors | 2023 | USA | 8 min
A lost and amnesiac narrator explores the toxic and alien waterways of New York City in order to discover his relationship to this environment and what it means to be human.
Yusuf Demirors was born in Turkey, where he started his journey as a lens-based artist through film photography and alternative printing techniques. He is currently a sociology PhD student at The New School of Social Research, where he is researching the social relations of production entailed by gendered materialities under contemporary capitalism through an interdisciplinary lens. His experimental work in filmmaking and photography often explores themes of immigration, ecological imaginaries and post-industrial landscapes as ways of resituating our knowledge of the material world around us.
recortes
Kimberly Forero-Arnías | 2023 | Colombia/USA | 10 min
Field journal entries, both mine and others, are ground together to explore what is filtered and what remains as families of fauna and flora move from one environment to another.
In one generation the ecological knowledge my family gained living on a coffee farm in Colombia has been filtered out. Looking to the former generation to root myself, this film is composed of observations made by family members of a place that existed as a present-tense for them over 35 years ago as well as in my current place of residence, the unceded land of the Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples (Boston). These observations take the form of Whatsapp messages, drawings, historical field journals and handwritten descriptive texts straddling multiple time periods and geographical locations. This project is in conversation with the scientific field notebook as a technology that helped structure a very specific way of engaging in the act of observation; one of categories and compartmentalization that sustains dislocation and places pressure on the nature of “belonging.” recortes intertwines personal, community and historical observations, and explores observation as a collaborative process that intermingles the past and future into present tense rhizomatic observations.
Kimberly Forero-Arnías is an experimental animator whose work has screened across the United States as well as internationally at festivals including Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Images and Edinburgh. She is the recipient of various awards including the SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and the Film Studies Center Fellowship at Harvard.
Language Unknown
Janelle VanderKelen | 2022 | USA/Spain | 6 min
Language Unknown embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator and educator currently based in Knoxville TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives in New York and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter. Recent awards include juried awards at the 2023 Ann Arbor Film Festival and the 2023 Thomas Edison Film Festival. Janelle was a Summer 2023 MacDowell resident and is currently working on new projects during a year-long Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. In addition to making time-based media, VanderKelen also co-curates a screening series called aCinema with Taka Suzuki.
Oculto [Hidden]
Sebastian Wiedemann | 2023 | Colombia/Peru | 9 min
The celestial bodies enunciate something in the midst of their mystery. The moon turns red, the planet cries, the fall is deeper than we could imagine. Hidden, something lurks. In the middle, a requiem or perhaps an elegy. The uncertain as a path that leads us to a catastrophe that we do not know is past, present or future. But which is undoubtedly a deep memory of a dark secret. The broken whispers of a wounded jungle.
Sebastian Wiedemann is a Colombian filmmaker-researcher and philosopher-practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. His works investigate liminal intersections animated through experimental cinema and philosophy, aware of a possibility for thought-cinema as living poetic ecology and a surface for the affirmation of a cosmopolitics of image. His award-winning films including Obatala Film and Deep Blue have screened in venues around the world and at retrospectives in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Ireland. In 2015 Wiedemann’s Los (De)pendientes was included in Artforum’s list of the best films of the year and in 2017 his Abismo was included in the film series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America at Los Angeles Filmforum.