the way things are. the way they are going to be. part five.
July 15th, 2022
8:30pm Doors
9:00pm (not punk time) screening.
@The Art Park lawn
1930 35th Street
DENVER, CO 80216
FREE - Donations accepted and appreciated.
(artists still get paid)
A screening addressing how our current culture will define and limit the futures available to us.
Title: Grassland
Artists: Director: Sarah Kanouse
Sound Design: Jacob Ross
Interview: Gordon Yellowman
Camera: Sarah Kanouse, Jeffrey Palmer, Youngsun Yun Palmer
Animation: Sarah Kanouse, Allison Bako, Christopher Bailey, Taylor Snead
Statement: The essay film Grassland excavates the stratigraphic layers of belief, ecology, practice, and geology that form a northeastern Colorado landscape. Carved out of decimated ranch lands during the Dust Bowl, the grassland is both a conservation zone and a working landscape. Cattle grazing, nuclear missiles, hydraulic fracturing, and wind power generation co-exist within a few miles of each other, all unfolding on territory whose ties to the Cheyenne people were affirmed by US law. The film locates the grassland in historic and geologic time, ranging over changing frameworks of law, ideology, and cosmology, variable and contradictory human practices, and the material and geological forces of the land itself. Meditative original footage of the grassland merges with found footage and collage animations to portray the refuge’s subterranean actors, which include well shafts and aquifers, missile bunkers and colonies of ants. The resulting film is a poetic and unsettling portrait of a place whose apparent contradictions unsettle both what is sustainable and what should be sustained.
Year: 2019
Origin: United States
Title: Tumbleweed
Artist: Kim Shively
Statement: Tumbleweed explores the history and impacts of the Russian Thistle plant and the Kochia plant (both commonly referred to as tumbleweeds in their dried out form) on agricultural practices in the west.
Year: 2015
Origin: United States
Title: What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto
Artist: Hope Tucker
Statement: Visitors and residents of the Tularosa Basin, site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb, contribute to the production of public memory as they offer philosophical reckonings, logistical advice, and plaintive cries about making "the journey of the dead." Between 1945 and 1992, the US federal government exposed people to the radioactive fallout from over 200+ detonations of above-ground nuclear weapons. 2020 was the 75th anniversary of the detonation of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US and the 340th anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt forced Spanish colonizers out of New Mexico and returned sovereignty to Native people. Made in resistance to nuclear colonialism.
Year: 2021
Origin: United States
Title: Das Marsprojekt
Artist: Georg Koszulinski
Statement: Das Marsprojekt merges non-fiction filmmaking traditions with science-fiction. The story revolves around the first-person account of a Martian colonist who reflects on her experiences leaving Earth, terraforming Mars, and ultimately taking part in the revolution for Martian independence. The story merges historical accounts of space exploration, the legacy of colonization in the Americas, and 20th & 21st century world history with speculative fiction, imagining a dystopian future very much in keeping with the current trajectory of contemporary world events.
By the year 2492, the 1st phase of the Martian terraforming campaign has made Mars amenable to life. 1000s of colonists inhabit the Red Planet. Meanwhile, Earth has moved into the ‘late Anthropocene’ after the 6th mass extinction renders much of Terran life extinct, the planet’s equatorial land masses inhospitable to humans, and the last of the glacial deposits have melted into the oceans.
The vast majority of Earth’s human population can no longer sustain itself. Ultimately, a Martian rebellion forms around the philosophical posthumanist premise that all life in the universe is sacred, and that the destructive human forces on Earth must be stopped.
Year: 2021
Origin: USA
Title: Stay with me, the world is a devastating place
Artist: Angelo Madsen Minax
Statement: A group of news anchors, politicians, athletes, celebrities, and Texan bystanders time travel from the year 1970 to heed a dire warning.
Channel 8 News in Dallas Texas has archived its entire broadcast history. In collaboration with the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU, I was invited to make a piece from this archive (specifically the year 1970) without knowing what footage was in it. Sifting through 80 hours of material unearthed the expected: sports, car accidents, fires, beauty contests, politics, the Vietnam war, coded and blatant sexism, racism, and various complacencies to state sponsored violence. Some things were in supreme redundancy: police brutality, racially motivated violence, climate change, poverty, and abuse of power; the marks of late-stage capitalism that we are very familiar with today. In a time-warping dramaturgy, the news anchors from 1970 are reimagined as pseudo-divine bearers of a potential truth, transplanted from 50 years in the past and appearing before our eyes to weave a proclamation of impending doom. In poetic decree, we are told in great detail the peril of our world, yet offered no explanation of how to prevent it, nor the definitive cause. From past images, a future-image is constructed.
Year: 2021
Origin: United States