by Jonathan Ali
As one world ends and another begins, seven films interrogate the meaning of extinction, survival and community in In The Lifespan Of Stars.
In The Beginning and End of Everything, Viveka Frost combines found footage and animation to create a miniature-epic history of the universe, as a pair of children provide an improvised voiceover narration musing on the wondrous nature of life, death and rebirth. Conversely, Greg Marshall’s Between the Blur opts for geographic specificity, taking map coordinates of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells in Alberta, Canada and transposing them onto other locations, in a rhythmic meditation on a colonial system of geological extraction and its indelible relationship to the present.
steinrunnin (petrified) also has a meditative focus on place and geology. In this analogue memorial to a volcanic eruption that displaced an Icelandic community, Chris Paul Daniels and Anton Kaldal Ágústsson interweave contemporary images of the disaster location and other volcanic sites with an evocative composed score. The accompanying synthesised testimony of survivors poetically underscores the connection of people to the land: ‘What I thought was a rock was home.’
The connections between nature and technology are interrogated in the Moojin Brothers’ The Trace of the Box. Here a found work – seminal video artist Nam June Paik’s installation TV Garden (1974) – is updated through the placement of chickens (real? virtual?) among Paik’s original plants and television screens, the AI voiceover pointing to questions relating to technological advancement and the future we wish to create. The future – or rather, a future – is where Webb-Ellis set their documentary-fiction This Place is a Message, in which young people radically imagine a new, regenerative state of being, as they listen, dance, draw and sing their way beyond our current, actual-dystopian crises.
Set in another world entirely, Mona Keil’s animation Juice is a tactile fable, a gooey reminder of the often-symbiotic nature of existence. And in By Leaves We Live we return to the wisdom of children, as Bash Khan anthropomorphises trees, playfully but pointedly underlining how much they are a part of us – and we of them.
