Things

Ijen / London

Inspired by Richard Jefferies’ late 19th-century ‘After London’ - one of the earliest post-apocalyptic novels - the film serves as test footage for how a future London might look. How a city that no longer exists might appear, having disappeared. Instead, in its place a vast toxic swamp, spewing ocherous smoke and chemical waste, with electric blue sulphurous flames emerging from the dead land. Shot on location in and amongst the craters and sulphur mines of the Ijen volcano complex in Indonesia, the imagery is accompanied by a recording of Herbert Read reciting his poem ‘The Autumn of the World’.

Alice

A tribute to Alice, the survivor of Friday 13th, edited from a VHS tape.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

Mare's Nest

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Bogancloch

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

Krabi, 2562

Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

Ghost Strata

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Slow Action

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

After Work

A collaboration between filmmaker Ben Rivers and sculptor Céline Condorelli, with contributions by writer and artist Jay Bernard, After Work blurs boundaries between labour and leisure using nimble essayistic encounters that are as suggestive as they are concrete.

Urth

The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

The Hunchback

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

Trees Down Here

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

There Is a Happy Land Further Awaay

This new work is developed from footage collected during a trip to the remote and beautiful sub-tropical island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. In March 2015, after Rivers’ visit, Vanuatu was devastated by Cyclone Pam, laying waste large parts of the islands. Rivers’ 16mm lm material has become a record of a place that has irrevocably changed. Filmed on 16mm and then digitised, island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding lm and deteriorate until they are no longer recognisable.

Now, at Last!

A film of a sloth, using three-colour separation to show sloth time.

At Night

After an abortion, a woman roams the streets, engaging in a sequence of understated encounters bathed in the glow of neon lights.