THE LAND: Artists’ Film and Video that Listens to the Earth

The Land connects seven films, all focused in some way on planet Earth, concerned with the land and its relationship to people, history, language, belonging, and the future. These films take viewers on journeys through time and space, across landscapes, even across the galaxy. The intentional use of sound and image is important to all of the films, with considered voice-overs and soundscapes and layered, textured imagery. The films invite viewers to listen to all the stories the land can tell us, to think beyond what’s visible on the surface.

The following films were screened on November 3, 2022, at the Broadway Metro in Eugene, OR, as part of the fourth and final screening in the time/space screening series curated by Julie Perini and presented by Eugene Contemporary Art.

This program is presented below in a YouTube playlist, and is available for viewing until December 8, 2022. Read more about the time/space screening series here.

Program 

Faces, Displays, and Other Imaginary Things
Woodrow Hunt, 2021, 9 minutes & 52 seconds

A familiar route is remapped to contemplate and remember the complicated past of Indigenous labor in the Pacific Northwest.

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Aquí
Melina Kiyomi Coumas, 2019, 4 minutes & 9 seconds

Aquí is an experimental 16mm short film exploring what home means to a multicultural young woman living in Oregon. Shot in the beautiful Oregon Dunes. (In Spanish with English subtitles)

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We Only Answer Our Land Line
Woodrow Hunt & Olivia Camfield, 2019, 5 minutes & 50 seconds

We Only Answer Our Land Line is an experimental essay film which explores the character of the Alien, non-linear Indigenous experience and the material specificity of digital video to resist the violence of Settler Colonialism.

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Remote Points
Jen Vaughn & Erin Mallea, 2020, 5 minutes & 20 seconds

Cumulative Skies, Deep Soils is an ongoing collaborative project between Jen Vaughn and Erin Mallea. The project began as a performative act of attempting to listen to the vibrations of an ancient rhizomatic network of fungus in Oregon. Jen’s act of listening turned touch into sound, while thousands of miles away Erin took Jen’s recordings and sent them throughout the atmosphere via SSTV, a form of image transmission via radio. The video Remote Points combines SSTV video and audio transmissions, field recordings, and audio sourced from NASA. Thematically, the project aims at an expanded intimacy—a move towards contact despite distance, difference, and time. It explores the ineffable: time and physical scales beyond human perception. The actions of looking and listening thread together accumulations of decay with moments of the living, the cosmic, the future. Earth and sky are intertwined to generate closeness against the pace of separation between species.

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Terra
Julia Oldham, 2020, 10 minutes & 23 seconds

Terra envisions a post-climate change, post-apocalyptic future. The video depicts earth as a deserted wasteland with a female artificial intelligence (AI) system named Terra, performed by the artist, who acts as both companion and guide to the remaining humans on Earth, teaching them how to navigate the harsh environment.