An Act of Wonder and Gratitude
A forest cinema programme curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, with Patricia Dominguez, Kyriaki Goni, Ailton Krenak, Agnieszka Polska, Laure Prouvost, Tabita Rezaire and Emilija Skarnulyte.
Woods: More-than-Human Curiosity symposium, Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic, 28-30 July 2023
Ecologies @ Serpentine, London, 12 February 2024
Patricia Dominguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2022 (still). Courtesy of the artist.
The cluster of films that constitute this programme includes primarily artists' moving image, yet human and more-than-human collaborators abound. While all the films are very different in tone, pace and provenance, they share reflections on technology, the more-than-human world, and manifestations of the sacred as it appears in ecological and techno-shamanic thought and practice.
Emilija Skarnulyte's Aphotic Zone brings the artist's slow, methodical eye face to face with the shimmering splendor – and existential dread – of the deep sea, where otherworldly landscapes meet human infrastructure.
Like many of her works, Tabita Rezaire's Premium Connect is concerned the political and ecological stakes inherent in today's landscapes of advanced technology – suggesting decolonial strategies at the meeting point of organic, technological and spiritual worlds.
In Kyriaki Goni's The Mountain-Islands Shall Mourn Us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), plants address the viewer directly, taking on the role of oracles, sharing their fearsome projections for a warming future. Simultaneously, the plant-oracles imagine a decentralised alliance of techno-shamanic interspecies communities, known as 'data gardens'.
In The Book of Flowers, Agnieszka Polska combines AI-generated animation with 16mm film, while the work’s cli-fi narration presents an imaginary history for human-plant relations – a millenary and more deeply symbiotic relationship.
More intimacy with flowers emerges in ebullient celebration through Laure Prouvost's Into all that is here, a film which foregrounds interspecies attraction and pleasure as a narrative structure to burst forth from warm darkness into lusty release.
Shamanic practices from the Peruvian Amazon meet feminist techno-visions in Patricia Dominguez's Matrix Vegetal, a video that proposes an unplugging from the technological "digital matrix" in favour of an attunement to the "vegetal matrix", revealing human-plant relationships and quantum entanglements. The film includes an interview to Amador Aniceto, a healer practicing in the Madre de Dios region (Peru).
The programme's title, An Act of Wonder and Gratitude, is a quote from visionary and tireless activist leader Ailton Krenak, whose voice brings the last film in this programme, Time and Love, to life. Part of a cycle of films, or "arrows" about our relationship to, and responsibility towards, our lively, more-than-human planet, Time and Love concerns itself with the interconnectedness and metabolic processes of Gaia, bringing cosmovisions from the Brazilian Amazon in dialogue with Western physics.
Programme:
Emilija Škarnulytė, Aphotic Zone, 2022
Tabita Rezaire, Premium Connect, 2016
Kyriaki Goni, The Mountain Islands Shall Mourn us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), 2022
Agnieszka Polska, The Book of Flowers, 2023
Laure Prouvost, Into all that is here, 2015
Patricia Dominguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2022
Selvagem, Time and Love, 2022
Tabita Rezaire, Premium Connect, 2016 (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Kyriaki Goni, The Mountain-Islands Shall Mourn Us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), 2022 (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Laure Prouvost, Into all that is here, 2015 (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Emilija Škarnulytė, Aphotic Zone, 2022 (still). Courtesy of the artist.