A programme of artists’ moving image works which share reflections on technology, ritual and the more-than-human world.
This evening of screenings includes works by Patricia Dominguez, Kyriaki Goni, Agnieszka Polska, Laure Prouvost, Tabita Rezaire, Selvagem/Ailton Krenak, and Emilija Škarnulytė. The programme will be accompanied by live interventions by artists Kyriaki Goni and Patricia Dominguez.
An Act of Wonder and Gratitude was originally curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Serpentine Head of Ecologies, as part of the Woods: More-than-Human-Curiosity symposium. Organised by are-events.org, the event takes place annually in the Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic. Woods operates at the intersection of contemporary art, the landscape, human health, and interspecies coexistence.
Programme:
Patricia Dominguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2022
Emilija Škarnulytė, Sunken Cities, 2021
Kyriaki Goni, The Mountain Islands Shall Mourn us Eternally (Data Garden Dolomites), 2022
Tabita Rezaire, Premium Connect, 2016
Laure Prouvost, Into all that is here, 2015
Agnieszka Polska, The Book of Flowers, 2023
Selvagem/Ailton Krenak, Time and Love, 2022
Curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Ecologies
Kostas Stasinopoulos, Curator, Live Programmes
Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes
Eva Speight, Curatorial Assistant
Isobel Peyton-Jones, Production Coordinator
ABOUT THE WORKS
Set 10,000 years in the future, the mermaid archaeologist of Emilija Škarnulytė’s Sunken Cities investigates ruins of the past (our present); the result of humankind’s reluctance to act to prevent a threatening climate catastrophe.
Like many of her works, Tabita Rezaire‘s Premium Connect is concerned with the political and ecological stakes inherent in today’s landscapes of advanced technology. The film suggests 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 and 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.
Intimacy with flowers emerges in ebullient celebration through Laure Prouvost‘s Into all that is here. The film 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. This video work proposes unplugging from the technological “digital matrix” in favour of attuning to the ‘vegetal matrix’, an act that reveals 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 activist leader Ailton Krenak, whose voice brings to life the last film in this programme: Time and Love. Part of Krenak’s 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.
