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Leticia Ramos’s film DROPSPIKE is the second of a five-part film project entitled STORIES OF THE END OF THE WORLD. Each film in the series takes place in a different part of the world where climate change modifies the landscape.  The short 16mm film was mostly shot during Ramos’s residency at La Bacque in Switzerland. The science fiction movie is set in 2044 when large glowing spheres inexplicably appear in different landscapes of the globe, one of them on the gelid coast of Pyramiden, a former Russian mining town on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the High Arctic, and totally abandoned in 1998. Ramos visited the uncanny location in 2012, and it is not until DROPSPIKE that some of the images she captured there have found their place in her practice.

Daily Life of Human by Siavash Naghsbandi is a fast-paced series of still images selected by the artist from ImageNet, which is a massive dataset of images (about 14 million) produced by BigGAN. Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs for short, are AI (machine learning) programs capable of generating (synthesizing, not finding) high-quality images. BigGAN is trained on how to make a certain type of image and then starts producing new images like those it learned from. Naghsbandi uses BigGAN’s output to present a rapid sequence of images that, if seen individually, are uncanny—a strange and off-kilter version of the world we inhabit. But when seen at high speed the viewer only catches glimpses of what looks like a world slightly askew, figures a bit grotesque. The sounds are recorded by Naghsbandi , from his daily life in Tehran, combined with sounds downloaded from the internet. Together with the computer-generated voice, and the script written by Naghsbandi, the result is an elegant combination of human and non-human production. One might even say a collaboration between the artist and an AI: the subject and speaker is neither entirely human, nor AI but a blend of both.

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment. Ganesh’s work takes inspiration from the cave on the right in the painting of the bodhisattva Maitreya, located adjacent to the animation. The cave structure is elaborated upon the extensively built out, introducing an interior depth where the ultimate transformation happens. I wanted to work with a narrative structure of dreamlike density, moving the viewer through a succession of physical and psychic spaces. The animation opens with Mandarava waking up to a dream in her bedroom and follows her journey through the Bardo, the sometimes terrifying passageway between death and rebirth. The aerial and gliding camera movements reconfigure imagery of the Bardo from paintings with a greater sense of space and depth. The work also combines the artist’s line drawings, watercolors, and paintings with pictorial elements from a variety of original sources.

Interested in the collection of object and their potential to evoke various emotional reactions in the audience, Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone is an invitation into the limitless netherworld of the unsaid and unspoken. Exploring the metaphysical landscape of secrets, lies and psychosexual ambivalence, this work is an attempt to create a site for contemplation. The video ventures to provoke a rhythmic trance through transporting the mind into a distant illusionary world constructed by vignettes of fractured spaces. Bopape interrogates the notion of space within video through a celestial journey to a contemporary sublime disturbed by constant movement and disruption. Through employing images and sound that are loud and dissonant and displaced, Bopape isolates her references creating a sense of awe, anxiety and dysphoria within the chaos. Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone challenges the viewer’s understanding and familiarity to contemporary objects, animals and landscapes.

Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience by Naomi Ricón Gallardo is a fabulation in which four characters find themselves in temporalities that overlap Mesoamerican narratives about the creation of the world with the contemporary time of accumulation by dispossession. Together, they summon the powers of fire and joy so that the opossum conjures its ability to play dead and resuscitate in extractivist areas.

In Enrique Ramírez’s Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place. Shot in Uyuni, Bolivia, the film depicts the world’s largest salt flat, a site that sits in a mountainous region at over twelve thousand feet above sea level. Ramírez’s work is deeply invested in the loss of regional identity, and the anachronistic dress of his “modern-day shaman” in the film is meant to reconcile the historical and cultural gaps between tribal traditions of a specific time and place and the all-too-prevalent homogeneity brought on by advanced capitalism. His festive yet ominous ceremonial mask, by extension, functions as a relic of colonial resistance: made by native coal miners to ward off Spanish invaders, the mask signals a need both past and present to preserve rituals passed down through future generations and across cultural genealogies.

Smoke and Fire is the first chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy, a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures. Wang’s tetralogy examines the fractures in the modernization of China’s Northeast region. He surfaces overlooked incidents of violence in Chinese society, and characteristic narratives drawn from the past century of the history of greater Northeast Asia, beginning with the May 4th Movement and continuing on to the Chinese Civil War, the Jeju Uprising, and the contemporary plight of migrant workers. The locality of the film series demonstrates an alternative perspective of the region through local culture, spirituality, and historical facts.

After two years of research in close conversation with anthropologists and archaeologists, Michael Linares eventually enrolled in classes to study archeology—specifically the history of material artifacts. He became obsessed with the origin of metaphor, and the stick as the Ur (earliest) object used by humans that led to the formation of meaning itself. This video, which accompanies Museum of the Stick is part of major work surveying material culture collected and presented by the artist through a complex narrative of associations and anthropological research. Here “aleatory” means not just random but subject to the complex and organic forces of chance. As early as the Pliocene epoch, the stick as a specific, three-dimensional form has played a vital role in the technological, social, political, aesthetic, and religious development of humanity and some animal species. The chimpanzee’s tool that catches termites, the facial ornamentation of the Yanomami people, the Shulgi of Ur’s weaponry—as well as the toothpick, knitting needle, and vaulting-pole—all represent a minute slice of the myriad transfigurations that this form has undergone throughout history.

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scenes. The hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night. An uninterrupted soundtrack of car sounds plays continuously throughout, both at play with the images on screen and disjointed from the video’s repeated stops and starts. The vehicles begin to resemble more abstracted forms of shape and color: flattened yet mobile, these synchronous moving blocks form an intricate dance of mechanized motion. Representing the constant flow of vehicles on a two-way urban street, Automóvel focuses on the pace of life on any normal working day, and Marcelle’s video offers a playful reimagining of a traffic jam as a symphonic composition of movement and sound. Despite its frequent visual humor, however, Marcelle also considers the struggles of a modern-day labor force and the inexorable cost of “working” in relation to time and resources. Automóvel, by extension, is also a work about stasis and the experience of being caught in an intermediate space, always in transit to an indeterminate destination that never arrives.

Through the language of dance and choreography, Void by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this dance video is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of his bodily presence on the screen, and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity.

Há Terra! (There Is Land!) is a short film that picks up on the previous film Idade de Pedra (2013), in which artist Ana Vaz imagined pre-modernity in her native Brasilia. Vaz returns to the young protagonist of Idade de Pedra, Ivonete dos Santos Moraes, who has joined Brazil’s 40-year landless movement that struggles to wrest land from powerful agriculturalists. Ivonete also hails from the region of quilombos, what was once settlements of runaway slaves that resisted the colonizers. Darting camera movements appear to chase Ivonete through the high grass. The present-tense voice-over seems to fuse with the past in the myopia of the long focus lens. The recurrent sound loop of a man shouting “há terra!” (literally: “there is land”) conjures up the distant memory of colonialism. But the beauty of this collage rests on the impossibility for the spectator to let this past “pass”; the current testimony involves a mayor who has taken over the lands of the indigenous people by threat. As the artist describes her 16mm cine-poem: “Há Terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey.”

The virtual reality work Aquaphobia by Jakob Kudsk Steensen examines it’s title subject matter – the fear of water. Inspired by psychology studies used to treat aquaphobia, the work employs VR technology to merge imagery of past and future geological landscapes, as well as external ecosystems with internal psychoscapes. Steensen mobilizes the visual exploration of the fear of water to transform viewer’s perceptions on water-related climate change, such as rising water levels. While traveling through mud, water, plants, and subterranean infrastructure, the viewer is guided through the five stages of a break-up narrative by a water microbe. Throughout the journey, an aquatic alien recites a poem about a break-up between the landscape and the viewer. The five parts reference a common five-step treatment that patients with aquaphobia undergo. To create this virtual landscape, the artist used satellite imagery, as well as soil and rock types that Steensen photographed.

In the performance video Vitrina, María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores. As the day and passers went by, the routine became more playful: she would send kisses to bus drivers on the busy Avenida Jiménez who would return them, use the newspaper with which she was shining the glass to flirtatiously hide and engage with an improvised audience or draw the shape of her body with soap and a sponge. She would interrupt these chores to carry out other ‘feminine’ activities, like brushing her hair or applying make-up, only to return to frantically cleaning the transparent surface that separated her from the public.

Inspired by the 1934 novela Duo by French writer Colette, Sriwhana Spong’s film Beach Study explores ideas of disappearance and the ephemeral, both physically and psychologically. In the film, a female body conducts abstract dance movements on a beach, responding to the environment that surrounds her. This particular beach was one the artist loved as a child, but today it is hardly accessible because it is in the hands of a private landowner. Shot on 16-millimeter film through colored filters, the film has intense flashes of magenta, violet, and amber, and other flickering “light leak” effects. The female body appears and disappears intermittently, creating a surreal and mysterious presence. The overall effect suggests a precarious relationship between memory and experience, transience and monumentality.

The word Coyolxauhqui refers to femicide or the killing of women in rural Mexico on the basis of gender. The mutilation of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the sun god and human sacrificer, is reimagined in this film. Coyolxauhqui by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is the first in a trilogy of films that positions itself as a form of political resistance, delving into the relationship between current Mexican femicide and broader cultural traditions. The film takes place in the abandoned La Mixteca region, home to several textile maquilas–manufacturing assembly plants that export duty-free components. Here, Coyolxauhqui’s original femicide links with the wave of the brutal femicides which began among young women working in the maquilas in Ciudad Juárez.

Intersticio traces the topography of a non-specific site, an in-between zone. The video presents a panoramic view of two territories of a shifting and unresolved character, composed out of segmented events that visually intersect at a shared horizon point. Over the images, a fragmented and ambiguous poetic narration describes, by means of images found in digital archives, a hybrid site that permutes the representation of nature through its fusion of source material. The sense of permanent wandering designates an excursion with no precise destination, a mental place of fractured limits with an amplitude larger than any physical location. This trajectory appears to be dictated by the circumstances of an open field, where concrete places are now only points along a route, and the in-between moments that mark a continuous state of transition are the ultimate destination. With Intersticio, Elena Damiani presents a journey to a territory comparable to contemporary space—a world so ample that the spatial and temporal coordinates essential to historicity fade, throwing our impressions of reality into question.

In Stong Sory Vegetables, Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling. Each video, in this series, is an odd still-life representation turning everyday elements into imaginary and funny stories. A tomato, an onion, a lemon, and a carrot are displayed in front of the monitor as relics. These vegetables are also present, outside the monitor, to assure the spectators as well that the stories we are hearing are true. The artist invites us to participate in her stories and to sort out the inextricable connections between language, image, and perception. In many of her videos, Laure Prouvost uses as a starting point her own family life, her acquaintances, or even her pets. Her daily stories drift quickly towards odd and funny connections. Thus, in the video Stong Sory, the artist prepares a beautiful cake for her brother’s birthday, which contains living surprises such as spiders and birds. The piece of bread on the stand is a relic, which brings us to see beyond its mere appearance. In the same way, if Laure Prouvost uses her family as “raw material” it is not only to create a contrast with her surreal stories but also to speak about the complexity of daily life as a constant invitation into her works: “Behind! Look Behind!”.

In her film Retiro (2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo considers how women pass down memories to their kin as they age. A film within a film, the three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives. As a result, the film “reorganizes” ancestral trauma, giving the artist freedom to reject or move on from her inheritance, if she chooses to.

Alka domo by Sebastián Calfuqueo is a performative video work that recontextualizes a story about Caupolicán, the Mapuche toki (meaning symbol of strength and perseverance in the face of adversity). Caupolicán was elected military leader by the Mapuche people of Chile after successfully completing the challenge of holding a log on his shoulders for two days. Caupolicán led the Mapuche army in the first uprising against the Spanish conquistadors from 1553 to 1558.

The film Limbé by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes its inspiration and its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-creator of the negritude movement. This Creole expression, which activates the Limbo dance through language, evokes a great sadness, linked to the death of the artist’s sister. This silent film continues Abonnenc’s collaboration with dancer and choreographer Betty Tchomanga, who played the protagonist in his film Secteur IXB (2015). In Limbé Kleyebe Abonnenc attempts to give form to a state of deep melancholy, while echoing the reflections of Guyanese poet Wilson Harris, for whom the Limbo dance is a way of evoking, through its contortions, the gestures that slaves had to invent to survive crossing the Atlantic ocean in the hull of slave ships. It is said that the Limbo was born on slave ships during the Middle Passage; there was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders. In the film, the black body appears and reappears progressively in the darkness, obliging the spectator to adjust their sight in order to apprehend what is happening before their eyes.

Heat Waves by Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of the different aesthetics of heat by drawing from the aesthetics of regions defined by hot and humid climates and associated with histories of coloniality such as ‘the global south’ and the ‘developing world’. The video takes the form of a curated broadcast or music video of historical and contemporary imagery and videos of both found and filmed footage, including media broadcasts; TikToks; DJ sets; an interview with Keanu Reeves; an excerpt of Ho Tzu Nyen’s 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art (2005); an interview with KADIST Collection artist Julian Abraham Togar; and DJ sets. The barrage of footage weaves together contrasting tropes about the tropics: depicting it as a diseased paradise; naturally abundant, yet economically poor; filled with people who are at once energetic and lazy; with dynamic aesthetics, but lacking order. Arranging snippets of popular culture into a narrative of contradictions, Chan deconstructs the collective imagination of the notion of the ‘tropics’.