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.
“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.
“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
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.
“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
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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)
Fish Point, Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 16mm, 7 min, 2015
Fainting Spells, Sky Hopinka, Ho-Chunk Nation, 11 min, Digital, 2018