Lines of Descent Screenings Still of Anyox (2022)Saturday, August 3rdWith a finger to her lips by Alana BartolAnyox by Jessica Johnson and Ryan ErmacoraWHEN: Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 at 6 - 8PMWHERE: EMMEDIA Main Space, 2005B 10 Ave SW, Calgary AB With a finger to her lips by Alana Bartol(2021, 10 min 30 sec)A witch's hands emerge from an abandoned coal mining operation in the area now known as the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. As the witch navigates these former mine sites, she begins to grapple with the ongoing impacts of environmental degradation.About Alana BartolAlana Bartol (she/they) comes from a long line of water witches. Their site-responsive artworks explore divination, drawing, and dreaming as ways of understanding across places, species, and bodies, critically engaging with the impacts of extractive industries like coal and oil. Through collaborative and individual works, they examine our relationships with the Earth, the elements, and what are colonially known as natural resources. Long-listed for Canada’s Sobey Art Award in 2019 and 2021, Alana’s practice includes drawing, experimental video, performance, sculpture, participatory art, public art, installation, and curatorial work, presented in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. Alana is a white settler with Danish, German, English, Irish, and Scottish roots. In 2015, they moved to Mohkinstsis, Treaty 7 territory, (Calgary, Alberta), and began teaching at Alberta University of the Arts.Anyox, Directed by Jessica Johnson & Ryan Ermacora(2022, 35mm/65mm/Archival, 87 min)ANYOX depicts the lives of the two sole residents of an abandoned company town while unfolding a complex labour history and revealing the vestiges of environmental degradation. Combining large format cinematography and an inquiry into the archival record, ANYOX interlaces past and present.About Jessica Johnson and Ryan ErmacoraJessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora are award-winning filmmakers based in Vancouver, BC. Their work investigates the visible and invisible ways in which humans have engraved themselves into natural spaces and is informed by an interest in avant-garde depictions of landscape and labour. Their style is defined by a self-reflexive and structural approach to cinema. Their work has screened at festivals such as Cinéma du Réel, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Open City Documentary Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, and VIFF. Accompanying Matilda Aslizadeh's Moly and Kassandra, we are hosting a series of double feature screenings. Still from Black Sea files (2005)Saturday, August 10thExtractions by Theo Jean Cuthandblack sea files by Ursula BiemannWHEN: Saturday, August 10th, 2024 at 6 - 8PMWHERE: EMMEDIA Main Space, 2005B 10 Ave SW, Calgary AB Extractions by Theo Jean Cuthand(2019, 15 min 13 sec)Extractions traces parallels between natural resource extraction and Canada’s booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected him, he reflects on having his own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby. About Theo Jean CuthandTheo Jean Cuthand (b. 1978 Regina SK) is an experimental/narrative filmmaker and indie game developer working with sexuality, madness, Indigiqueer/2S identity and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals and galleries internationally. He is Plains Cree/Scots, a member of Little Pine First Nation, residing in Toronto, Canada. black sea files by Ursula Biemann(2005, two-channel video installation, 43min)Black Sea Files is a territorial research on the Caspian oil geography: the world’s oldest oil extraction zone. A giant new subterranean pipeline traversing the Caucasus will soon pump Caspian Crude to the West. The line connecting the resource fringe with the terminal of the global high-tech oil circulation system, runs through the video like a central thread.About Ursula BiemannUrsula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water.In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects.Her earlier writing and experimental video work focused on the gendered dimension of migration. With Black Sea Files (2005) Biemann shifted the primary focus to natural resources and their situated materiality. In 2010 she co-initiated the collaborative World of Matter project on global resource ecologies. Thank you to our funders Canada Council for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development and Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
