Program 6 | Drawing From Calcareous Milk Teeth
7:00 PM | Sunday, July 21st 2024 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Craigmillar Forest, Juulia Kala, 6 min 08 sec
Synopsis |
A performance, a prayer and a poem for a forest / with a forest / within a forest.
Craigmillar Forest is part of a series of films based on a collaboration between local ecosystems, performer and sound designer david yates, filmmaker Juulia Kala, performer choreographer Monica De Ioanni, performers Sky Su, Pamela Szykula, Daniela Polic and musician Sorcha Carlin.
Artist Bio |
Juulia Kala (b. 1994 in Helsinki, Finland) is a filmmaker and artist living in Edinburgh, and working both in the UK and Finland.
Juulia explores the fluid relationship of imagination, liminality and everyday life in her films. She is inspired by landscapes, site-specific folklore and mythologies, childhood and environmental themes. Her work ranges from fiction to experimental films and mixed media work.
Forest Coal Pit, Siôn Marshall-Waters, 14 min 38 sec
Synopsis |
Two elderly brothers live together on a small farm in Forest Coal Pit, south Wales. This super 8mm portrait explores the mundanity, vibrancy and intimacy of their relationship and hyperlocal world. As they feed their livestock, tend to their garden, the brothers discuss elephants in China, lobster fisherman, ghosts and each other.
Artist Bio |
Siôn Marshall-Waters is a Welsh filmmaker based in Bristol, England. Having studied an MA in visual anthropology at the University of Manchester (2016), his work is grounded in experimental and ethnographic documentary. He has exhibited at film festivals including BFI London Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Courtisane and Alchemy Film and Moving Image. He is a member of the artist film collective BEEF (Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film).
Kõverdama, Karl Kaisel, 4 min 16 sec
Synopsis |
Karl grew up in Estonia in a peatland forest called Kõverdama. At the moment Kõverdama is being prepared to be cut down by a mining company with the goal to expand the peat extraction for the production of gardening soils. In the film, these incomplete representations of Kõverdama float in the digital space. They tell stories of the place that used to be, is and will be. Ghosts of trees are hanging above the destroyed landscapes, flowers growing in punctured spaces, memories creeping in the broken world. It's clear that a forest cannot be reduced to numbers and pictures, a few species or resources. The destruction results in this haunting presence. By contrasting the living, the nonliving and digital, a web is formed. It’s made up of connections without an edge or a centre, interconnections that exist as part of an ecological system. With this web, the destruction is brought to question – what is done to this land, to these relationships? The story of Kõverdama is a story of humans, non-humans, living and nonliving.
Artist Bio |
Karl Kaisel is an artist and designer from Estonia (Art & Science, MA University of Applied Arts Vienna). As a designer he sees value in aesthetics as a tool to access the viewers’ attention and as an artist he is interested in the relationships that humans and nonhumans have; the artificial dichotomy and tension that is dividing the world into natural and unnatural. He grew up in a peatland forest, which is the defining aspect of his creative work. Through this connection he sees the world as an intertwined relationship expanding through every aspect of life.
On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes, Ayla Dmyterko, 9 min 55 sec
Synopsis |
Written, Directed, & Produced by Ayla Dmyterko
Composition by Miel
Director of 16mm Photography Alex Hetherington
Dancer Kirstin Halliday
Supported by Creative Scotland & Pangée
16mm processing by Kodak Film Labs London & Digital Orchard
On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes (2023) is a postscript to Kyiv Frescoes (1966) by filmmaker Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990). His film was conceived of as part of an “industry-wide effort to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory” in the Second World War. Kyiv Frescoes heralded Parajanov’s “surrealist and balletic style that would become the directors signature,” as seen in his later masterpiece Colour of Pomegranates (1969). Kyiv Frescoes was deemed pacifist, provoking an anti-war message, and was furthermore critiqued as semi-autobiographical, resulting in its suppression by Goskino, the central state film committee in Moscow. During Glasnost or the Soviet Thaw (1986–1991), a period that saw intentional efforts towards institutional transparency and freedom of information, 15 minutes of remaining rushes were re-discovered in a film canister labelled “Diploma Film.” On Volya imagines the unearthing of a second.
Central to this moving image work is a meditation on the proto-slavic term: воля (volya), a lexical lacuna that describes the will and desire to exist beyond societal constructs; to be wildly emancipated. A slippery term, volya is described by Russian mystic writer Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952) in her recently translated text Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints. Teffi chronicles Liberté as a person who finishes work early, takes their hat off and is free to read the newspaper; to sit and think in the café. They are free because they have abided by the rules of society. In contrast, Teffi describes Volya as a person who takes their hat off and runs into the field, blinded by the sun as they enter into an unbroken horizon. In On Volya’s opening scene, a figure appears to float through a forest; a guise that requires being high on the toes, with knees bent and stuck together; the hips and torso unnaturally controlled. It is anything but freeing. In the following shot, the figure escapes this muscle memory in a literal attempt to volya as she runs into the remains of the ancient Caledonian Forest. The film begins in an acknowledgement that volya itself, to flee into an unbroken horizon, the densest of forests, leaves one in solitude.
On Volya considers reverence and regeneration across social, political, and spiritual planes. It punctures idyllic façades of an eternally abundant nature, revealing how this ethos perpetuates the accelerated decline of our ecosystems today. If volya is indulged in sparingly, it is an essential space for rest, articulation, slowing down, and regaining the energy that can bolster reflective action. The film’s supernal crescendo depicts one such space by ascending the horizon and entering into a blue sky. It is the blue of Chernobyl’s velvety glow; Natalka Husar’s tubes of toxic Glasnost-market cobalt; Derek Jarman’s last words; Chantal Akerman’s From the East; Kandinsky’s symphonic ecstasy, iconostasis gates’ enamel. It is the elation of altitude, the raging sea, morpho’s span, lover’s eyes.
Blue is a loss of consciousness,
a sense of self,
it is falling
– but which way is up?
Revisiting Parajanov’s Kyiv Frescoes at this particular time is especially poignant as it sheds light on cyclical attempts to erase Ukrainian culture, occurring again today in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Working through a series of artistic interventions in On Volya, what is missing is filled in with what is geographically available. The finale is a golden affair that draws parallels between the Fontaine Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of Nations Fountain) in Moscow, Russia and the Doulton Fountain in front of the People’s Palace in Glasgow, Scotland. On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes alters these symbols of soft power through an action led by ritual; simultaneously cleansing the self of assimilation and insular identity formation. Breaking the fourth wall, I invite you to do the same.
Note: All quoted descriptions are original words by the Dovzhenko Studios. This is where the negative of Kyiv Frescoes is housed today, in the Dovzhenko National Centre in Kyiv. The Centre is Ukraine’s largest film archive, which is at great risk as a consequence of the current Russian invasion.
Written by Ayla Dmyterko
Edited by Clara Puton
Artist Bio |
Ayla Dmyterko (b.1988) is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Glasgow and working internationally. She was born in Saskatchewan on treaty 4 territory, the traditional lands of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis
Reactivating and re-embodying histories of possession and dispossession, she locates vestiges of freedom in archival silence and expanded fields. This reverberates across a range of media including painting, moving image, writing, sculpture, textiles and texts. Mirroring mercurial translations of extant material culture and the apophenic nature of contemporary cultural memory, her works are para-fictional puzzles of synchronicity that reflect diasporic imaginaries, syncretic slippage and post-internet haze. Led by solastalgia, she seeks remedy to environmental anxiety by re-establishing a culture-nature synthesis through animist returns. Confounding auto-theoretical impulses, she choreographs a score for her studio imbued equally with articulations of the ritualistic, pre-patriarchal, tacit, vernacular and folkloric. This leads her work to disintegrate canonical interpretations of art history and forms of artistic labour. Materially, she is interested in presence over perfection with an emphasis on process, circulation, and redistribution. Oscillating between reverence and regeneration, she is invested in ways to ethically extend histories, movements and ideas that have come before. Circling eternally recurring ways that images are used to inform desire and belief, she takes agency in artist as medium.
I Would Rather Be a Stone, Ana Hušman, 23 min 48 sec