// Tectonic Breaths //
Friday, March 6, 2020
7:00 PM
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust St
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Provissorio/Iterim (2017)
Eleonora Manca, 2 min 37 sec, video
Synopsis:
Even in this moment we have on a second skin, which is both a support and a place, and cocoon us into something we will never part with. Something that seems temporary, but in fact re-modulates each memory and each instant. Words, the act of walking, weaving, entwining memories. Everything is provisional and listening to the echo running through ourselves. The blurriness of the past, present, and future does not have any solution of continuity anymore. Investigating the temporary traces of a metemorphosis is a pretext to investigate the misunderstandings and contradictions of memory itself.
Artist Bio:
Eleonora Manca (Lucca, 1978), who graduated with a thesis on Russian Avant-gardes, is a visual artist exploiting various types of media (mainly photography, video, video-installations, visuospatial works and artist's book) to create communication pathways through installations and micro-narratives (where image and text often interpenetrate in order to call into being a hybrid form of poetic code). She developes a research about the metamorphosis, the memory and the memory of the body. She has exhibited in numerous festivals, solo and group in Italy and abroad. Lives and works in Turin (Italy).
Wolves From Above (2018)
Demelza Kooij, 5 min 40 sec, video
Synopsis:
Wolves From Above is a meditation on a pack of wolves filmed from the air. The elusive animals inhabit a tranquil space where sounds of playful growling, sniffing, and licking feel oddly nearby. Many interactions take place in the video – it is evident that the wolves are communicating, but we as human viewers are not sure what is happening. The film draws the spectator in and allows the viewer to discover a different wolf.
Artist Bio:
I'm an artist/filmmaker and senior lecturer in filmmaking at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. My work is presented at film festivals, museums, art exhibitions, and conferences.
Highlights are winner of the Jury Prize at the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival 2019 for Wolves From Above, Wroclaw Media Art Biennale, Festival Du Nouveau Cinéma, Hamptons, Full Frame, FACT, and Edinburgh International Film Festival.
My film and research interests relate to depicting other worlds: un(der)explored territories nearby and far away; human and non-human, Other animals, ecologies of the sea, land, sky and exchanges in-between, hybrid film, sci-fi, sensory film, and film as art.
Space, the air, the river, the leaf (2009)
Luke Sieczek, 11 min 47 sec, 16mm & HD video
Synopsis:
"Space, the Air, the River, the Leaf" is a film about the speed and volatility of water. Commissioned as part of the city of Seattle’s “Water Calling” public art initiative, the film is an impressionistic meditation on the way water radically impacts the landscape of the American Pacific Northwest. In a region, surrounded and shaped by water, a fragile balance is maintained between human and natural elements, development and sustainability, flow and stem. The title, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature, points to the interconnectedness of all things in our environment: an interactive and transformative experience of everyday space, movement, and time.
Using a mixture of interpretive strategies (documentary, expressionistic abstraction, improvisational music and dance), "Space, the Air, the River, the Leaf" explores the passage of water as it undergoes a series of natural transformations: traveling inside the soil, filtering through swales and cascades, and replenishing the garden. The project was filmed on-location in different areas of Seattle, where efforts have been made to create ecologically mindful and sustainable approaches to water management. Using 16mm photography, the film captures the emotive and textural qualities of the Northwest landscape. The tactile materiality and fragility of analog film is emphasized by using a radical direct-application technique: a process that included burying the film in the ground for over a year so that it could be tangibly “exposed” by the natural environment.
"Space, the Air, the River, the Leaf" is a true collaboration with the rain, wind, sunlight, and soil.
Artist Bio:
Luke Sieczek makes narrative, documentary and experimental films and digital media.
His film work has been exhibited widely, including the Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and the European Media Art Festival.
Originally from Poland, Luke Sieczek studied at Bard College and received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin. He’s been living in Seattle, WA since 2006, where the overcast sky makes for the most subtle and shimmering light.
What Doesn’t Neglect the Home Makes It Dance (2019)
Kaya Erdinç, 8 min 56 sec, video
Synopsis:
The first film as part of a series, it centres the domestic as an inevitable starting point for unmaking oneself in times of digital nativity. The control we exert over the frame is far removed from pottery throwing, which is difficult to plan except for the activity itself. Therefore, the results will always assume new and different outlines, as opposed to our rectangular screens.
Artist Bio:
Kaya Erdinç (Maastricht, 1994) has worked as a writer and filmmaker, but recently started to explore materiality as a counterweight to his socialization as a digital native.
Terril (2019)
Bronte Stahl, 13 min, video
Synopsis:
The geography of the otherwise flat city of Charleroi is defined by slag heaps - hills formed from the waste material from coal mines. Filmed entirely from these terrils themselves, the film weaves large-scale industrial tragedy with the poeticism of ecological rebirth through a data-driven narration in which the terrils are the protagonists.
Artist Bio:
Bronte Stahl is a documentary filmmaker from Westerly, RI, USA. Having studied, worked and lived among Rome, Lisbon, Budapest, Brussels, and now Brooklyn, he has come to find place at the intersections of culture. He recently magna cum laude from the European documentary directing MFA program DocNomads and is currently a UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow. His films deal with encounters with the natural world and have screened at international festivals including Rotterdam, DocLisboa, Uppsala, Pravo Ljudski, and Leuven and won prizes at Minsk and Porto Post/Doc.
ourself (2015)
Hannah Subotnick, 4 min 17 sec, video
Synopsis:
in the darkness i can see
no
other
Artist Bio:
Hannah Subotnick (b.1992, Providence, RI) makes art using film, animation, photography, dance and sound. Although her work crosses many disciplines, at its core is a love of the transformative potential of the lens. She uses visual mysteries to explore non-corporeal intimacy. Hannah has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2017) and I-Park, East Haddam, CT (2017). She has been awarded grants from Brown University, Stanford University, and the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. Her films have screened internationally. She holds her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Film/Animation/Video (2016) and an AB from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media (2016). She is currently an MFA candidate at Stanford University.
Mother of the Blueness (2020)
Shadia Heenan Nilforoush, 14 min 11 sec, video
Synopsis:
Mother of the Blueness interweaves performance art, film, and cut-paper animation. The film progresses through a slow series of moving images that travel between moments of reflection and contemplation abruptly into moments of neurosis and absurdism. Beti, the protagonist, seeks to hold the intangible weight of blue in others, using the color of blue to speak to the implications of trauma. She employs magic, fabricated ritual, and symbolism of the evil eye to anoint those inflicted by trauma and to mark the perpetrators. Mother of the Blueness conjures fictional time travel, stifles on looped thoughts and folklore, while juxtaposing fictional story with personal narrative. The sequences are layered in imagery, symbolism, sound, and concept, which together invoke confusion, disorientation, and disruption. Beti is haunted by her religious upbringing, searching for peace through surrender only to be challenged by superstition, obsessive behavior, and the residue of trauma.
Artist Bio:
Shadia Heenan Nilforoush is a multidisciplinary artist working in video and performance to reconcile polarizing identities. Shadia is the recipient of the Crandall-Cordero Fellowship, the Barbara Bullitt Christian Memorial Award and is a 2020 semi-finalist for the US Fulbright Award. Her work has been exhibited in shows including Plexus Projects New York, Artspace Hartford, Atlantic Wharf Gallery Boston, and the Multicultural Caucus for the Society of Photographic Education in New Orleans. She received her BFA, with a minor in Psychology, from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. Currently, she is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Connecticut.