04/08
Het Bos
Ankerrui 5-7, Antwerp
Ans Mertens - ‘Sunday’ (2019, 10’) (avant-premiere)
20:30
Set in a natural reserve ‘Sunday’ treats the frame as a path, guiding the spectator’s eye like the wanderer is guided along sights.However, the frame hits the tension between the rough landscape of the heather and its cultivation.
Lina Laraki - ‘PLANT.MOV’ (2019,20’) (avant-premiere)
After all human life disappeared from earth, a plant recalls its dream about a contemplative 'last observer'. The dream is cinéed to us by a bored artificial intelligence. A dystopian narrative tries to reconnect us to possible lost affects.
+ Film of choice: ‘There is A Happy Land Further Awaay’ (2015, 20’) by Ben Rivers
There Is A Happy Land Further Awaay captures the landscapes of the remote volcanic Republic of Vanuatu archipelago, before they were devastated by Cyclone Pam in early 2015, the footage becoming a ghostly document of an ecosystem now irrevocably altered. A hesitant female voice reads a poem by Henri Michaux, recounting a life lived in a distant land, full of faltering and mistakes. Island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island, made on the opposite side of the world. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding film, a lone figure on a boat drifts at sea.