// Temporal Remove //

Friday, May 3, 2019
7:00 pm
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust St
Milwaukee, WI 53212

// Works by Portia Cobb //

Along Toogoodoo and a new work in progress

// As Sweet // by Emily Packer // 2018 //
// 10 minutes 51 seconds // video //

Synopsis:
As Sweet is a poetic investigation of the filmmaker's middle name, and the namesake's migration. The loss and recovery of Packer's great-grandmother's Hebrew name allows the consideration of a doubling of identity, and the choices available to those who experience intergenerational assimilation. Jewish themes and traditions are present throughout the piece as an offering to ancestral resilience, and as a key to understanding patterns and conventions in claiming identity. Rose garden imagery acts as a window into the promised land of a new country, the sickly sweet paradise of conformation, and the thorny, unsympathetic history of immigration policy in the U.S.

Artist Bio:
Emily Packer is an experimental non-fiction filmmaker with an interest in border culture and border theory. She is a fellow in the 2018-2019 Collaborative Studio at Union Docs in Brooklyn. Emily graduated from Hampshire College in December of 2015. The following year, she organized a three-day art event in San Diego and Tijuana, where she screened her second feature film, La Frontierra Chingada. In addition to her independent work, Emily is a freelance editor and a pre-screener for film festivals in New York City. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.

// ALTIPLANO // by Malena Szlam // 2018 //
// 15 min 30 seconds // 35mm transferred to video //

Synopsis:
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.

Coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, Chilean blue whales, and more, ALTIPLANO makes use of in-camera editing to create evocative visual rhythms through the clash of color and form. Landscapes pulse and stutter, transformed through complex 16mm pixelation and superimposition techniques into spaces that exist in a multitude of times simultaneously. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.

Artist Bio:
Born in Chile, Malena Szlam is an artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of cinema, installation, and performance. Her practice explores the relationship between the natural world, perception, and intuitive process. The poetics developed through her time-based works and in-camera films engage the material and affective dimensions of analogue film practice.

Szlam’s work has been exhibited in numerous festivals and museums including Rotterdam, Toronto, New York, Edinburgh, Media City, 25 FPS, Mar del Plata, and Hong Kong Film Festivals, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Solo screenings have been presented at Los Angeles Filmforum, San Francisco Cinematheque, and FICValdivia (Chile). Her latest film ALTIPLANO premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths and was chosen as one of TIFF’s Top Ten Canadian Short Films of 2018.

Szlam currently resides in Montreal and is a member of Double Negative, an independent artists' collective dedicated to the production and exhibition of experimental cinema.