„Degrowing Poetics and Counter-Ecologies“ symposium (anglų k.)

Degrowing Poetics and Counter-Ecologies

A symposium for celebrating other life and re-thinking image production

Convened by artist-researcher and film maker Miklós (Miki) Ambrózy (Vilnius Academy of Arts) and the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival, with support by the Department of Photography, Animation and Media Arts and the Doctoral School of VAA.

In the shape of six short artist talks and demonstrations, the symposium gathers artistic practices in photochemical imaging and imaginaries. We aim to raise questions for image production by artists, exploring a rich field of contradictions that come with the contemporary cultural and ecological realities of planet Earth. Rather than staying with simple doomism, we propose ways to move forward that celebrate life without placing the human at the center of film art, re-thinking our own habits of extraction and instrumentalisation.

Location: Malūnų str. 3, Room 102 (Old Building)
Start time: 16:30

Program Outline

Monday, 1st December
16:30     Karel Doing (NL): Dwelling, Filming and Experimenting in the Woods
17:30     Michaela Davidova (NL/CZ): Dissenting and Discarding

Tuesday, 2nd  December
16:30     Film Farm Canada

·       Phil Hoffman: 31 Years of Film Farm Making: Play, Chance and Collaboration
·       Adrian Kahgee (Saugeen): Nii kina ganaa — all my relations
·       Terra Long: Fugitive Colour
·       Deirdre Logue: On Collectivity

Talks

Dwelling, Filming and Experimenting in the Woods
By Karel Doing

December 1st at 16:30, Malūnų str. 3, Room 102

In this talk artist and filmmaker Karel Doing reveals how the making of his award winning film A Patriot of These Woods (2024) is connected to the local ecosystem, the messy interactions between plants and photochemical film and the changing weather patterns. The film was initially inspired by Italo Calvino’s book the Baron in the Trees. Calvino’s book tells the adventures of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. The film is populated by Hazel and Chestnut trees, grasses and meadow flowers and the filmmaker himself who interacts with his environment in a performative and ritualistic manner. Additional layers of botanical material are employed as an external shutter, a means to interlace the lens based images with living patterns and as photographic developer. These materials are far from being static, they grow, evolve and decay and filter the light of the sun, producing a range of colours on the black & white film stock. While the other elements of the process can be explained in much detail, these colours are more mysterious. The unravelling of this mystery takes us from the pre-photographic experiments by 19th century astronomer Mary Somerville to the latest discoveries in nanoparticles.

Dissenting and Discarding
by Michaela Davidova (CZ-NL)

December 1st at 17:30, Malūnų str. 3, Room 102

During the ‘Dissenting and Discarding’, we will look on the photographic darkroom as an entity with its peculiar tempo – digesting materials, processes and substances inwards and expanding further from its dark walls into the outward worlds. By deconstructing photographic materiality and by experimenting, which is embedded in bodily and organic processes, we can reimagine the images not as flat plains but as living strata. The materials are a feeding ground for the transformation. What remains is revived through the process, captured, or decomposed. The wet film/photo lab comes alongside the bio lab and the garden. The usually undesirable elements in photographic practices such as moulds, fungi, heat, acidity, corrosion, rain, are embraced as part of expanded imagining practice, going beyond the pure visual interpretation of the photographs. Eventually, the matter which accumulates during the photographic processing is envisioned to continue becoming part of the ecosystems forming our artistic practices.

Film Farm Canada

31 Years of Film Farm Making: Play, Chance and Collaboration
By Philip Hoffman

December 2nd at 16:30, Malūnų str. 3, Room 102

Philip Hoffman will talk about film practices developed through the Independent Imaging Retreat (aka Film Farm), a hand processing film workshop in Southern Ontario, 31 years in the works. The emphasis on community and process (Process Cinema), at the Film Farm Retreat encourages artists to embrace the unexpected and environmental temporalities through film, plunging into celluloid through different chemical and more recently, botanical processes. The film works made at the Film Farm Retreat are counter-archival, playful and no doubt utopian in their drive for both collective making and singular undertakings. This approach follows the practice of “vulture aesthetics”; it is collaborative and sustainable, and helps to release film from its once and for all death grip on time – to bring film emulsion into the life-world by connecting it to human bodies and the cycles of the earth.

Nii kina ganaa — all my relations
By Adrian Kahgee

Nii kina ganaa — all my relations — lies at the core and foundation of ‘our’ artistic practices in the 16mm process cinema workshop, Saugeen Takes on Film. Adrian Kahgee will explore the origins and history of this collaboration with Saugeen First Nation, along with the mnidoo ontological framework taught through the teaching of ode’imin (the heart berry), which guides this creative process.

Fugitive Colour
By Terra Long

Terra Long will share her filmmaking practice in relation to spaces of collective image making and collaboration from the Film Farm to her collaboratively made film Feet in Water, Head on Fire to her recent explorations with flower, mineral and metal tints and tones made as part of a project called “fugitive colour” with filmmaker Lisa Marr. This research asks how natural dyes and metals extracted by hand interact with photo chemical emulsion to create relational images. The name “fugitive colour” comes from the understanding that natural dyes change over time and with exposure to light emphasizing the mutable quality of the process.

On Collectivity
By Deirdre Logue

Deirdre Logue will talk about making films from a personal place within temporary community structures such as the Film Farm. Logue will introduce the notion that communal spaces/ad hoc collectives etc, offer emotional, social and ethical economies rarely found. As an alternative to commercial frameworks or industry models, the Film Farm (and its proliferations and variations) support a growing list of things artists need; including but not limited to; access, connection, collectivity and purpose.