IN THE LISTENING GARDEN: NEW MEXICO (SPRING 2019)

 

Media City Film Festival is in New Mexico April 16-20 at Experiments in Cinema v. 14. MCFF Program Director, Oona Mosna presents a program of films commissioned by and/or featured at past editions of MCFF.

IN THE LISTENING GARDEN is dedicated to the memory of recently departed filmmakers and friends: Jonathan Schwartz, Robert Todd, Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer and to the 23 Indigenous tribes of New Mexico — 19 Pueblos, three Apache tribes (the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, the Mescalero Apache Tribe), and the Navajo Nation. The nineteen Pueblos are the Pueblos of Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna, Nambé, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Zuni and Zia.

IN THE LISTENING GARDEN features work by Barbara Hammer, Sky Hopinka, Malena Szlam, Pablo Mazzolo, Ana Vaz and Jeannette Muñoz. Friday, April 19 at 6:30pm at The Guild Cinema / 3405 Central Ave NE, Albuquerque, NM.

SCREENING ORDER. 

ENVIO 24 (for Helga Fanderl), Jeannette Muñoz, Chile/Switzerland, 16mm, 3 min, 2010 
“The landscape as force field. The primordial act of being in and sensing the world through gestures and faces, silhouettes of light and biomorphic shapes which act as vectors of mobilization.” – Martin Grennberger

Sanctus, Barbara Hammer, USA, 16mm, 19 min, 1990 
Sanctus is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisible, visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems. Sanctus portrays a body in need of protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate.

Atomic Garden, Ana Vaz, Brazil/ Portugal, 16mm-digital, 8 min, 2018 
“We could say that a firework is not different from a tree, or from a big artificial flower that grows, develops, flowers and dies in a few seconds. Withered, finally, it soon disappears in unrecognizable fragments. Well, let’s take this firework and make it last for a month, and we will have a flower with all the characteristics of other flowers. Or so, inverting the order of factors, may we imagine that the seed of a plant can explode like a bomb.” – Bruno Munari
Fish Point, Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 16mm, 7 min, 2015
Light radiates through and across Mazzolo’s Fish Point. With its deciduous forest harbours and rare ecosystem located at the southeastern tip of Pelee Island, situated in the western third of Lake Erie, it is the most southerly-inhabited landmass in Canada, and a site of international significance for the study of migratory birds. The Island is part of the traditional territory of the Caldwell First Nations, sometimes called the Chippewas of Pelee. Fish Point was shot during one of Mazzolo’s extended visits to Windsor for Media City Film Festival.

Altiplano, Malena Szlam, Chile/ Canada, 35mm (or digital), 16 min, 2018
“Filmed in the Andean Mountains, in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, Altiplano takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, Altiplano reveals a vibrating Ektachrome landscape in which a bright blue sun threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.” – Malena Szlam

Strata of Natural History, Jeannette Munoz, Chile/Switzerland, 16mm, 12 min, 2012
Muñoz revisits the sites where in 1881 a group of Kawéskar natives from Tierra del Fuego were exhibited in human zoos across Europe, organized by the merchant of wild animals, Carl Hagenbeck from Hamburg. The tour’s final exhibition took place in Zürich in 1882, where most of the Kawéskar already affected by disease perished.
Fainting Spells, Sky Hopinka, Ho-Chunk Nation, 11 min, Digital, 2018

“Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant – used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.” – Sky Hopinka

***

One 
accounts for the origins
of people who write
and people who sing 

People in the rainforest 
say 
that when the gods
created peoples 
they gave them 
memory
so that 
through sound 
they could remember 
all their stories 
but they created as well 
some people 
with no memory at all 
these people they created
with a little notebook
in their hands 
of course
you may guess
they were Europeans
in the form of anthropologists 
as they showed up 
to the rainforest 

Then there’s another story
about sound
this one
is told 
in Lima 

When people 
come down 
the mountain 
looking for work
into the huge city of Lima
the first thing they hear 
is the roar of the motors – Cecilia Vicuña. THE QUASARS: Selected oral performances (The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church: May 6, 1995)