Panel 6
Eco-Futures and Moving Image

With: Teresa Castro (moderator), Ali Cherri, Pedro Neves Marques, Su Yu Hsin, Malena Szlam, Anton Vidokle

How do artists approach the looming environmental crisis? What is the future of the moving image in regard to environmental concerns? This panel will approach representations of the future in artists’ films focusing on eco-conscious and eco-critical practices and their history, as well as on Anthropocene visuality and anthropogenic thinking embedded in digital technologies.

“Eco-Futures and Moving Image” is the last of six panels in the online symposium The State of the Moving Image curated by Lukas Brasiskis, taking place this September 17–19 on e-flux Video & Film, and accompanied by the screening program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories (streaming September 6–20).

Teresa Castro is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, in Paris. A significant part of her recent research focuses on the links between film and animism, eco-criticism and vegetal life forms in visual culture. In this context, she published “The Mediated Plant” (e-flux journal, 2019), “The 1970s Plant Craze” (Antennae, 2020), and co-edited the collective book Puissance du végétal et cinéma animiste. La vitalité révélée par la technique (Dijon, Presses du réel, 2020). Her essays “The Past of the Future: A Vegetable Cybernetic Fable” and “Navigating Troubled Waters With Lichens, Fungi and Ruderal Plants” recently appeared in two exhibition catalogues (Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive, 2021 and Ciencia Friccion, 2021). In parallel with her research activities, she also works as an occasional critic and film programmer.

Ali Cherri is a video and visual artist. His recent work looks at the role historical objects play in the construction of national narratives. His recent exhibitions include Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; The Gatekeepers, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille - Manifesta, France; Trembling Landscapes, Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Comme un parfum d’aventure, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France. He is currently the Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London.

Pedro Neves Marques is a filmmaker, visual artist, and writer. They are cofounders of the poetry press pântano books, with whom they published their first poetry collection, Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems (2020), and translated the poetry of CAConrad into Portuguese. They edited the theory collections The Forest and The School / Where to Sit at the Dinner Table (Archive Books, 2015) and the upcoming YWY, Searching for a Character Between Future Worlds (Sternberg Press, 2021). Their films and artworks have been shown globally in major art institutions and film festivals.

Su Yu Hsin is a Taiwanese artist and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. She approaches ecology from the point of view of its close relationship with technology. In her film and video installations, her artistic research reflects on technology, ecology, and the critical infrastructure in which the human and non-human converge. Her analytical and poetic storytelling focuses on map-making, operational photography, and the technical production of geographical knowledge. Su has participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2021), Taipei Biennial (2020), ZKM Karlsruhe (2020), Kyoto Art Center (2020), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2020), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2019), and Junín Contemporary Art Museum (2018). She was a finalist in the 8th Huayu Youth Award (2020) and LOOP Barcelona Discover (2018).

Malena Szlam is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her films, performances and installations examine the relations between cinematic practice, embodiment, temporality, and perception. Engaging the affective dimensions of analogue processes, Szlam’s work gives material form to kinetic and lyrical approximations of the natural world. Szlam’s work has been showcased at leading festivals including Wavelengths at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), New Directors/New Films Festival at MoMA and Lincoln Center, Media City Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Festival, and CPH:DOX. Her latest film Altiplano received numerous awards, including 25 FPS’s Grand Prix, Melbourne International Film Festival’s Best Experimental Short Film, and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten 2018. Recent international group exhibitions include Time Machine, Palazzo del Governatore (Italy); Expanded Plus: Utopian Phantom, Factory of Contemporary Arts Palbok (South Korea); and The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Her first retrospective Inexistent Time was presented by Los Angeles Filmforum. Other solo screenings include San Francisco Cinematheque, Cornell Cinema, and FICValdivia.

Anton Vidokle is an artist and filmmaker born in Moscow and based in New York and Berlin. He is a founding editor of e-flux journal. His films have been presented at museums, festivals, and events worldwide, including the Yokohama Triennale (2020), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2019), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), the Venice Biennale (2015), the Istanbul Biennial (2015), the Moscow Biennale (2015), Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), and the Taipei Biennial (2012), as well as at the Berlinale, the Locarno Film Festival, the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, and Doclisboa.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.