| Foraged Futures|

| 7:00 PM | Friday, May 5, 2023 |
| Woodland Pattern Book Center |
| 720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI |

If you are not local to Milwaukee, or cannot make the screening, please continue to support Woodland Pattern by browsing their online bookstore!

ABRIR MONTE [Maria Rojas]

25 min 47 sec,  16 mm. Transfer 4K

Synopsis:
On July 19, 1929, in a town in Colombia, a group of shoemakers fought to improve living and working conditions in the country. They called themselves The Bolsheviks of Líbano Tolima. Their revolution lasted only one day, and its traces were almost completely lost. The women of this village share with Aura, an anarchist grandmother, a feeling that their rebellion is still going on.

Artist Bio:
Maria Rojas 
(1994, Colombia)

Visual Artist and Filmmaker. Co-director of La Vulcanizadora, Project Laboratory in Visual Arts, Cinema, and Expanded Theater. Her audiovisual work and installations are developed using moving images. She works with official and unofficial archival materials seeking to articulate in an expanded way how to present realities related to specific events of the past. These may be national speeches, war policies, the foundation, and colonization of spaces, among others. Her previous short films include FU (2018) and LA CASA LOCA (2016). In 2019, she received a Next Generation grant from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development

Seaweed [Julia Parks]

18 min 33 sec,  16mm

Synopsis:
16mm moving image artwork that explores the folklore, ecology, and history of seaweed in north Scotland. Voiced by seaweed harvesters, workers in the alginate factories, environmental activists, archaeologists, seaweed farmers behind the miracle resource. The film includes archive footage, oral histories and contemporary documentary footage of people working with seaweed.

Artist Bio:
Julia Parks’s practice encompasses film, animation and photography, often using series of photographs and projected 16mm film. Through this medium, she explores the different relationships between landscape, place and people, often focusing on the west-coast of Cumbria.

In April 2018 she was featured on BBC Countryfile where she demonstrated how to develop 16mm film using seaweed. In 2020/21 she took part in the  FLAMIN Fellowship where she developed a new moving image work about seaweed.

Julia is currently living in Hawick as part of a 6-month residency with Alchemy Film & Arts as part of their The Teviot, the Flag and the Rich, Rich Soil programme.

Elsewhere [Joseph Popper]

4 min 41 sec,  HD Video

Synopsis:
Elsewhere responds to the promise of virtual reality to experience new worlds as new characters in new bodies. The work imagines a fall from one reality into another, and a transition between physical and virtual senses of presence. A man stumbles and wades alone through a country stream. He appears out of place, his grey city clothes in contrast with the surrounding green landscape. On his face rest a pair of glasses with a lens conspicuously missing. He ignores the world around him, absorbed in the search for a means to escape it—to return to somewhere else and to be someone else.

Artist Bio:
Joseph Popper is an artist and designer working across various media including film, installation, and photography. His approach regularly transforms found objects, landscapes, and film footage in creating playful and critical fictions. His current work explores the complex interactions between collective imaginations and technological projects, examining visions of desirable futures and their different materialisations. He consistently engages with imaginaries of outer space exploration, responding to the premise that the extraterrestrial has been normalised by particular myths of progress.

In 2021 he received his doctorate from the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel with the University of Art and Design in Linz for his practice-based project titled “Fragmenting a Monolith: Exploring and Disrupting an Outer Space Imaginary”. He also holds an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. His works are exhibited internationally, including at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, La Panacée Centre in Montpellier, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.

Nuclear Salt [Emma Charles]

24 min 07 sec,  4K Video

Synopsis:
Nuclear Salt centres on a nuclear waste repository in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where scientists are working on a research programme to construct a system of markers or warning systems that will last 10,000 years. The film is a story about the physical existence of nuclear waste in the world today, but it is also a science fiction story about a speculative future and its inhabitants.

Artist Bio:
Emma Charles (London, 1985) is an artist working in film, photography and sound who studied Photography at the Royal College of Art in London and is currently studying at the National Film and Television School. Playing with the blurred lines between documentary and fiction, her work often explores different forms of invisibilities, and Charles is often drawn to subjects which are concealed, hidden or out of reach, whether that be the physical space of invisible technologies or more ethereal notions of the unseen. Her practice has developed in recent years to explore the different ways technology and geology intersect. Exploring the realm of rare earth minerals, media archeology and deep time, with a particular focus on nuclear cultures. She has produced numerous moving image works which have achieved success at international film festivals, art biennials and exhibitions including Serpentine Galleries, Institute of Contemporary Arts, HKW and Jeu de Paume, Sheffield DocFest and Visions du Réel. She has been commissioned by Tyneside Cinema as well as ZKM Karlsruhe to produce 16mm work ‘White Mountain’ for the exhibition Reset Modernity!, curated by Bruno Latour. In 2017 she was nominated for the ‘New Talent Award’ at Sheffield Doc Fest for this work. In 2020 she completed her first feature length film which was selected to screen at MoMA, New York, Visions Du Réel, Dharamshala International Film Festival and 74th Edinburgh International Film Festival. In 2022 Charles was invited by Centre Pompidou in Paris to present an evening of her film works spanning the past ten years. Charles’ films are held in two museum collections at Guangdong Museum of Art in China and The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany.