Exile Exotic

Haunted by Italo Calvino’s books and the land art of Robert Smitson, this audiovisual trip takes us through the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote. The excursion is used as a background to raise questions about art and mathematics, and whether they generate form in the same way as nature’s creative eruptions.

A film shot in 1957 at the Maudsley Hospital, London, captures children under observation for atypical behaviour. In the present day, three autistic respondents watch the footage, offering new and insightful interpretations of the children’s actions. Through speculation and identification, with wit and audacity, the responses forge a new soundtrack from an autistic point of view.

Just like sinkholes – these gaping holes that, since the 1980s, have damaged the roads and tourist sites along the shores of the Dead Sea (which bathes Israel but also Jordan and the occupied West Bank) at breathtaking speed – SALARIUM causes a collapse in the viewers’ perception: it obliterates their conception of this territory as being essentially empty, a space offered to tourists for its salty uniqueness. Drawing on the shared etymology of the words “salary” and “soldier”, the filmmakers re-inject a strand of history and politics into this space now given up to leisure (three soldiers enjoy their ice cream on the beach, a group of fifty-somethings living on the edge of the Judean Desert unpack their soda cans, deckchairs and transistors).

"Constant" is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. “Constant” asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.

A monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point.

Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in the waiting.

A cruise ship during the Brexit referendum. A colony of birds unwittingly killing the forest they call home. A world in a pandemic. Nothing is a closed system. In moving through these three ecologies the film questions what old images can mean after a rupture and offers a space of mourning. [Punto de Vista]

My Want of You Partakes of Me interrogates digestion as the fundamental condition for being in the world, a process of physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and scientific dimensions. Multiple storylines trace the poetics of incorporation as a matter of metamorphosis and decay, the philosophy of matter and imperial conquest, industrialisation and annihilation, poetry and parenting, love and citation.