2024 | Performance, 16mm Film, Eco-Processing, Sound Design, Installation
Collaborators/ contributors: Jenny Carolin, Matilda Butler, Max Martin, Danielle Georgiou
As participating artists-in-residence at the Mudhouse Residency in the Cretan mountain village of Agios Ioannis, our collaborative team of filmmakers, dancers and sound artists came together under the umbrella of this project, "Soft Geographies". Capturing movement on film between the two dancers, we began to envision the scope of the performance and installation. As soloists, the sense of solitude was heightened by the magnitude of the landscape, with the single performer joined only by their shadow under the harsh Cretan sun. As a duet, the artists moved in tandem, spreading clay over each other’s bodies, both as an act of care and a form of erasure, as on the film the white clay became a shadow in the negative. The artists' explorations into movement, alone and with each other, were performed with the landscape and became inseparable from a sense of place.
Our collaborative team of filmmakers, dancers and sound artists came together under the umbrella of this project. Capturing movement on film between the two dancers, we began to envision the scope of the performance and installation. As soloists, the sense of solitude was heightened by the magnitude of the landscape, with the single performer joined only by their shadow under the harsh Cretan sun. As a duet, the artists moved in tandem, spreading clay over each other’s bodies, both as an act of care and a form of erasure, as on the film the white clay became a shadow in the negative. The artists' explorations into movement, alone and with each other, were performed with the landscape and became inseparable from a sense of place.
Furthering notions of place, the Cretan landscape is infused throughout each element of this work; its plants, minerals, and materials. The 16mm film stock was processed in winenol, a developer made from wine from the local Taverna, and minthymol, a developer made from wild Cretan spearmint. Experimenting with alternative processing, we also developed the film stock with a grassenol formula, using the biochemical properties of Neptunia seagrass, Posidonia Oceanica, after it had washed up on shore, and in a rosemary bath, from the Latin Rosmarinus, meaning “dew of the sea”, taking advantage of the hearty shrub of the mint family, native to the Mediterranean, that grows so mendaciously in the Cretan mountain village of Agios Ioannis. After processing, the film was fixed in the saltwater of the Libyan sea, and tinted with beets grown on the Lasithi plateau and cabbage from its steppes.
The use of analog technology, such as working with 16mm film, and hand processing, is a rejection of the pursuit of the relentlessly new. Deriving processing baths from the earth, or capturing images on celluloid, we enter into an agreement with the physical material. In contrast to the human ideas of efficiency and speed, art mediums predicated on the art of waiting, and involving the natural environment, instead present us with geological time. These “earthly” processes refocus attention on the rhythms of the natural world, and in effect, present other possible ways of being. The film’s ability to record and influence the material works on its celluloid body is both a specific aesthetic choice and an ethics of slowness. There is a shared materiality between the human body and the film body. As filmmaker Babette Mangolte has said, “film has a pulse, an intermittent flicker, a heartbeat.”'
The first iteration of the work was shown at the Mudhouse Residency in Crete. The village of Agios Ioannis, located on the southern side of the Greek island of Crete, dates back to the 15th century.
We will be returning to Agios Ioannis in 2025 to complete this work.
