Artists' Film International: Solidaritet #6

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Note: These films are shown at KINOBOX, first floor, Prostneset Havneterminal, Tromsø. Kinobox will be moved out of Havneterminalen after this screening, so this is the last chance to visit it there.

Artists’ Film International is a partnership of 15 international organisations that celebrates moving-image. Every year, each organisation selects a film from an artist connected to their region, based on a collectively agreed theme.

Branching out from the theme of SOLIDARITY, the films selected reflect on the act of coming together, in friendship, community and resistance.

The two films on show reflect on environmental solidarity, poetically thinking about and with the environments that are sustaining us, both peatlands and waterways, and the systems that seek to destroy them.

En Ausencia (2023) by Caterina Erica Shanta, 27 mins (Selected by GAMeC, Bergamo)

Some voices tell of water dreams, wonderful and terrifying omens. In Central America, water is often contaminated and potable water is a private, monopolized commodity. But it has not always been so. Water is thus a political subject one would like to see shared and accessible, implying an overhaul of the entire urban fabric of Mexico City. The marshes of Xochimilco are the last reminder of the immense Lake Texcoco, which disappeared after the 1960s.

Born in 1986 in Germany, Caterina Erica Shanta is a visual artist and film director. She works primarily on moving images and contemporary art with different media output, and she makes movies based on private archives and collective film-making practices. Her works have been exhibited in art institutions such as Ca’Pesaro, Cineteca National de CDMX, MART, GaMEC, Careof - non profit for contemporary art, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, MAMBO, and screened at many film festivals.

Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass (2023) by Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons & Fabian Lanzmaier, 22:33 mins (Selected by Tromsø Kunstforening)

Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass is an audiovisual collaboration between Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons and Fabian Lanzmaier, focusing on peatlands and their interpretation through various recording and 3D computing technologies. Through the use of photogrammetry, a technology that relates to satellite mapping and archiving of anthropocentric spaces and monuments, the biotope is interpreted bit by bit in an intimate, close-up interaction. The work explores specific peatlands in Finland, Norway and Canada from various perspectives, decentralizing the human experience and focusing on the idea of natural landscapes as sources as opposed to resources.

Ingrid Bjørnaali is a multidisciplinary artist who records specific biotopes in various states of their ongoing world-building processes. With an aim to learn from our surrounding nature and co-existing species, her works explore the omnipresence of the digital in our experience of the world as well as the inability of technology to articulate matter’s complexity.

Fabian Lanzmaier is a musician and sound artist living in Vienna. In his often collaborative works, he mixes sound and other media such as performance, sculptural elements, light, and video, experimenting with perception and ideas of natural / artificial sounds, fluid and ambiguous environments.

Maria Simmons is a Canadian symbiontic artist who investigates potentialized environments through the creation of hybrid sculptures and installations. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, grows yeast, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself.

Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a partnership between: argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Belgium; Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA; Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in eXiLe e.V., (CCAA in EXiLe), Frankfurt, Germany; Cultural Center of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Forma, London, UK; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, USA; MMAG Foundation, Amman, Jordan; Project 88, Mumbai, India; Sapieha Palace, branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania; Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; Tromsø Kunstforening/Romssa Dáiddasiida,Tromsø, Norway; Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin, Germany.

KINOBOX screens a broad range of works and artistic approaches, selected with consideration for their material, political and aesthetic sensibilities, but central to our curation is this belief in the importance of artists moving-image to question how we consume and are consumed by our media landscape.