MARETOPIA

Maretopia & HICCUP present the film program "Landscapes of Resistance, Time and Ecology," focusing on phenomenon occurring through changes of perspective and animated camera movements as a way to redefine a place and its geography. The method is a frame-by-frame-camera 'animation' where the films works with displacements of time, space and focal points, sometimes with many disparate motifs, or the same places filmed during different times of a day in order to visualize weather and light changes, addressing a political/ecological environment to agenda. The result is an interaction between the predictable mechanistic nature of technology and the unpredictable qualities of the natural world.

To quote filmmaker Chris Welsby, Landscapes of Resistance, Time and Ecology ”invites the viewer to contemplate the complex relationship between the structures we invent in order to observe the natural world and the structure we perceive as a result of those observations. The resulting sequences of images suggest a relationship between technology and nature based on principles other than exploitation and domination.”

The program is curated by Isis Marina Graham and Daniel A. Swarthnas.

Bring warm clothes and a blanket. We will serve warm drinks.

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In Seven Days (1974) Chris Wesby (UK/CA) films a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Carningly in southwest Wales. Welsby explains the complex structure of the film, which also can be applied to all the films in this program, stating, “the camera motion is mechanistic; time is accurately calibrated in frames, seconds, and minutes, and space is organized according to geometric principals which govern the operation of the Equatorial Stand... The in-camera editing, however, is not at all mechanistic and is governed by the unpredictable nature of the weather: by the amount of cloud cover, which varied from day to day and by the speed of the clouds drifting across the sky, which depended on the strength of the wind.”

During one-day of filming (influenced by the paintings by Seurat) Jonas Mekas (LT/US) show in the film Cassis (1966) how the light, the ocean, and the wind, but also how people and boats that comes and goes in and out of to the frame, are visually changing the view of the landscape.

In Proximity (2006) Inger Lise Hansen (N/UK) plays with the horizon when a beach in North Jutland, Denmark, documented frame-by-frame along a track by a moving camera upside down, turns to be a materialist sky.

Jeanne Liotta’s (US) Observando el Cielo (2007) are made during ”seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth… Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself.”

Salt Garden/Jardin du Sel (2011) by Rose Lowder (F) is based on the sun, the wind and the sea, concentrates on materiality, small movements and reflections of light in the water of an ecological salt sea and ends with images of the last rests on a small park left fallow.