Film & Video (Film & Video)

“ I think we are oversaturated, filled to the brim with images in our inner subconscious eye. Towards the end of 2020, I was feeling very much that I couldn’t take in any more information visually. That was when I made Instruments of Air.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Adrian Balseca’s Suspensión I inverts the logic of the old colonial game, the greasy pole. Digitally filmed in the Province of Morona Santiago among the last existing community at the entrance of the Sangay National Park, a native girl climbs a balsa tree trunk from which plastic containers filled with “local” fossil fuels hang (super, extra, eco-país, gasoline, diesel, etc.). The trunk – which is lightweight quality wood, typical of the subtropical jungle of Ecuador -– has been cut down and suspended vertically and the trophies of modern progress hang from it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The project Grabador Fantasma (Phantom Recorder) consists of a communally constructed technological device in Sarayaku ancestral territory. Adrian Balseca’s site-specific composition is an “ecología del paisaje sonoro”, an artifact that collects sounds produced by different organisms, amplifying the complex historical plot of the area. From a traditional Sarayaku Peracian Dacryodes Copal wood barge with a solar cell panel system, an electric motor, a gramophone, and a recording system wireless audio, the specific characteristics of the soundscape are registered and transformed.

Painting (Painting)

The painting is composed of nineteenth century linen collected over five years. The pieces started out as offcuts from a large work called Fabaceae, which refers to the carob bean, an African staple found in the rainforest and tropical forests. The artist took these already dyed offcuts and dyed them further and then put them out in the sun to fade.

Installation (Installation)

Antillas

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions.

NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States