THE SILVER RECORD | DREAM STONES
Polar Film Lab and Tromsø Kunstforening present two experimental film programs at Verdensteatret as part of their ongoing festival ,The Silver Record, at Tromsø Kunstforening.
A screening program selected by Ruth Aitken and Sarah Schipschack:
Pleasure Prospects
New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse & Emilija Škarnulytė), 2019, 16:31 min
Commissioned for the 1st Toronto Biennial, Pleasure Prospects is a video that follows the artists as they acquire prospector licences, with which they aim to perturb the values of the mining industry by holding fast their self-described position as “the least productive mining company in the world”. Pleasure Prospects reveals a feminist utopia that swells with wonder and probes the potential for collective pleasure as a methodology of care for one another, and to right relationships with the planet. New Mineral Collective put forward the idea of counter-prospecting as a measure of rehabilitation—engaging concepts of renewal and revitalization, and treating, in their words, the “perforated landscape" as a body itself. With wonder-drenched propositions for a future of healing, New Mineral Collective ask: can you imagine a serene collective future where poetry, love, passive resistance, and lust are our core desires?
Last Things
Deborah Stratman, 2023, USA, Portugal, France, Jordan, 16mm → 35mm, 50min
What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s geology / is not irrelevant to us. – Hugh MacDiarmid
From before the beginning until after the end; evolution and extinction as told through the prism of minerals. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.
Catalyzed by two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, joint pseudonym of Belgian brothers Boex who wrote sci-fi before it was a genre, the film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also key are Roger Caillois’ writing on stones, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, Robert Hazen’s mineral evolution theory, the symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway’s multi-species scenarios, Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy.
In one way or another, these thinkers have all sought to displace humankind and human reason from the center of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud accompany us through the film. Stones are its ballast. We trust rock as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.
Total: 67 min
Free admission