Taru Elfving “Entanglement with others makes life possible, but when one relationship goes awry, the repercussions ripple”[1] Flying over the Baltic Sea, as the plane approached Copenhagen airport, I gazed at the expanse of blue below me, dotted with wind turbines, and thought for a moment that every white splash of a wave…
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Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart
Barnaby Drabble in conversation with Oliver Ressler[1] Barnaby Drabble: Hello, Oliver, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I want to start by asking you about the series of films entitled Everything’s Coming Together While Everything’s Falling Apart which you’re making at the moment about environmental activism. Oliver Ressler: The material for the first film,…
Read MoreMachines of Deceleration [1]
Vanina Saracino Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden, was built at the end of the 19th century to begin the extractive operations of iron ore in what later became one of the largest mines in the world. More recently, the city has become widely known to be “on the move”—dozens of houses were carried…
Read MoreScreen Ecologies
T.J. Demos[1] A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environmental injustice and social violence in aesthetically provocative forms. Consider the visual culture materializing and abetting pipeline blockades and Indigenous sovereignty struggles, including at Standing Rock in the US, with activists defending life, water, and land. Or…
Read MoreIntroduction: Ecologies – lost, found and continued
Volume 2, Fall 2019 Edited by Vanina Saracino Aimed at overcoming human exceptionalism and engaging the readers in post-anthropocentric worldviews, the SCB Journal, Ecologies – lost, found and continued broadly inquires into art’s agency in creating awareness and mobilization towards climate justice. With contributions by academics, artists, curators and activists, the journal deepens the Biennial’s…
Read MoreEditorial: Migrating Stories
Volume 1, Fall 2017 With aims of establishing a theoretical, analytical and exploratory extension of the Screen City Biennial and deepen out perspectives to the biennial’s framework of activities, the first volume of the SCB Journal departs from the theme Migrating Stories. This is a theme evoking notions of globalisation, post colonialism, diaspora and cultural…
Read MoreSettlement, Shelter and Stowaway: From Location to Logistics
Maeve Connolly What role does site play in the telling of ‘migratory stories’, and in art practices that are characterised by extension and expansion, but also attentive to borders and ‘logistical media of coordination, capture, and control’[1]? Documentary has, particularly since 2002, emerged as a privileged form for artists (and activists) to engage with…
Read MoreSpectrality and Dark Humor in Artistic Engagements with Refugee Mobilities: Incoming (2017) and Homeland (2016)
Nilgün Bayraktar We, the uncountable, doubling each checkboard square, your sea we pave with bodies, so many that you’d walk on it. You cannot count us: if you try, we multiply, we children of this horizon, washing us up, spilling us out. —Erri de Luca, The Uncountable[1] In Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2016), a film…
Read MoreArtist Conversation: Enrique Ramírez
On sails, poetry and the aesthetico-political history of Chile Stavanger, March 2017 Daniela Arriado: Your work is related to memory, the continuity of memory and exile; both in terms of content and in a poetic way, it has a strong political dimension. Also, sound is an important element. Maybe you would introduce your…
Read MoreWorking the break point: Maintenance, repair and failure in art
Teresa Dillon The artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote in her MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969!: “Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” In this one sentence, Ukeles sums up the tensions between our drive on one hand…
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