Emily Wardill, I gave my love a cherry that had no stone
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Emily Wardill’s I gave my love a cherry that had no stone (2016), the sixth and final installment of Here is where we are, on view from Monday, December 7 through Sunday, December 13, 2020, and featuring an interview with the filmmaker by Raimundas Malašauskas.
Here is where we are is a six-part program of films, video works, interviews, and texts put together by Laure Prouvost. It is the fourth program in Artist Cinemas, a long-term, online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Video & Film.
If you have missed any of the previous episodes, Here is where are will wrap with a repeat of all the films, available on this page for 24 hours on the program’s last day on Monday, December 14 from 12am till 11:59pm EST.
Artist Cinemas presents Here is where we are
Week #6: Monday, December 7—Sunday, December 13, 2020
Emily Wardill, I gave my love a cherry that had no stone, 2016
8 minutes
Holding in her mind Dorothea Tanning’s painting Some Roses and their Phantoms (1952) and its sickening presentation of objects as between states of being, Wardill made a film that also hovers between definitions. The architecture of the Gulbenkian auditorium in Lisbon, its colors and sense of being lost in time accompany us through a loop where a man wanders the building at night, followed by something that is not human. Through the care and paranoia with which she approaches the digital image, the artist investigates the haunting of the present by the past and the remnants of textures longing to be touched.
Excerpt from the conversation between Emily Wardill and Raimundas Malašauskas:
Raimundas Malašauskas (RM):
Do you ever think in terms of “benefitting” [an audinece]?
Emily Wardill (EW):
I think if you care about images enough it will always benefit someone, but it is hard to quantify how that happens. When I think of other artworks that have “benefitted” me— it’s hard to say how. Sometimes it is solace, sometimes it breaks you out of routine. It can make you want to move your body, it can feel like you’re being seen for the first time. It can empty your mind, or help you understand something that was confusing. Sometimes it is just a cold wave that makes everything new.
RM:
How did the vision of this film first emerge?
EW:
When I set out to make the film I started out with sketches, trying to think of this space —the GulbenkianMuseum—that is like the past imagining the future. I was thinking of a person being in that space, who is part of it; a person who is part animal, part synthetic, perhaps human, but mostly—and importantly—an image.
RM:
How do you find it when you watch it today? How has your experience of this film been changing in time?
EW:
I think it is probably closest to the work I would like to make next—so I have been thinking about it while thinking into images, or directly from images and performance. I have also been having dreams about bodies of people I love being drained of themselves but still being “animated”—and “going through the motions” with them as though they were “the real them.” We have all been surrounded with a collective fear of death lately. But I have also been relating that to the way someone’s eyes go dead when they stop loving you, and thinking of ways to relate it to the difference between the living and the dead body of someone you have known intimately.
RM:
Being drained of themselves? Do you mean depersonalized? Is that something you are going to explore in your next work? Can you tell us more about it?
EW:
I suppose it’s the old question of what it is exactly that has left a body when it stops being the person you know and starts to be a corpse. But also: What is it that has left two eyes that used to love you and now do not? It’s still early days for the new work, but yes, I think I want to explore this relationship by working with three bodies that are the same person at different stages in their life, confronting and remembering each other.
Watch the video and read the full conversation here.
About the program
Here is where we are highlights a variety of ways of representing the real across the realms of the living. How do we—humans. animals, plants—leave a mark? The contributors in this selection move across a spectrum of criticality and lightness, each finding a unique way of expressing their inner drive. We are together in this world and travelling along the road as it curves. We traverse geographic and geological borders as well as a (mountain) range of styles, sensations, and cultures. Hopefully you are here where we are!
Here is where we are is a program convened by Laure Prouvost as part of the series Artist Cinemas. It will run from October 24 through December 14, 2020, screening a new film each week accompanied by a text or interview with the filmmaker(s) by Prouvost and invited guests.
A repeat of all six films featured in Here is where are will be available for 24 hours on the program’s last day—on Monday, December 14, 2020 from 12:00 am till 11:59 pm EST. Watch them here.
With films by Gabriel Abrantes, Liesel Burisch, Stephanie Comilang,Nashashibi/Skaer, Pia Östlund, and Emily Wardill; and interviews and texts by Menna Agha, Mirene Arsanios, Liesel Burisch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raimundas Malašauskas, and Laure Prouvost.
About Artist Cinemas
Artist Cinemas is a new e-flux platform focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic process—producing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It will also acknowledge the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bind the artistic community. Over time this platform will trace new contours and produce different understandings of the moving image.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
