Убежище / Suoja / Shelter

The Apocalypse (2018) is an incisive and irreverent video from ContraPoints. Created and hosted by Natalie Wynn, the political YouTube channel began as a cult hit and now boasts over 500,000 subscribers, having recently garnered attention from The New Yorker and The Economist, and from the podcast Chapo Trap House. In The Apocalypse, Marie, a slender woman wearing white lingerie and glitter-encrusted nails, gets into her bath with a bottle of Moët and calls for her servant Antoine. When the door opens, it's not Antoine, but another woman in a lab coat and a purple wig. "The Doctor," as the visitor is known, has come to force Marie to watch an educational video about climate change. The pair argue, insult one another, and eventually encounter a personification of the sea, who's played as a raunchy cross between Ursula from The Little Mermaid and the child-devouring Cronus of Greek myth.

Trinket (2018) explores sites of peculiar interest such as an Astro Turf covered mound situated within a crossing point for tram tracks or a small pond located between a busy street and a Greek theatre-like setting. Through a poetic approach to filming and tragicomic narration, the film strives to locate these as absurdist ornaments placed within a typical urban contemporary city. The film reflects on the experience of travelling through these unconcealed parts of the city and the life of the objects - their neglected nature and the inevitable absurdity of interaction with them.

Concert for Adishi Glacier (2017): in his concerts/songs, played in nature, Oto Hudec performs for the landscape as his only audience. The music is often improvised, build on the atmosphere of the location, as a reaction, or as a dialogue. In itself, it belongs to the place and stays there as a tiny imprint of a moment, insignificant compared to the eternity of natural existence. Adishi Glacier, like other glaciers in the Caucasus Mountains, is getting smaller each year due to climate change. It sits in a larger glacier bed that points out to its previous size. As it melts, it turns in the waters of Adishcala River. A powerful stream of water, show of temporary abundance points to something, which is constantly disappearing. In the film, while the artist plays for the glacier, the sound of ukulele and harmonica is almost lost in the noise made by the river and all its little streams. At the end of the recording, almost symbolically – a freezing rain begins.

In No Shelter from the Storm (2015), the Eastern European landscape of mass deforestation provides a backdrop for the song whistled by the artists. The tune is that of the famous 1960s anti-war song "Where have all the flowers gone", which has been recorded and performed in many different languages over the years. The original lyrics were adapted by Peter Seeger in 1956 from a Ukrainian Cossack folk tune mentioned in Mikhail Sholokhov's 1928 novel And Quiet Flows the Don, in which war – in the form of both international conflict and civil uprising – provides the epic backdrop to the narrative. Throughout history, forests have provided a natural place for people to hide in times of war. Fleeing to the forest was often the only choice. Today, in a political landscape in which militarism, global power and war in all its forms are becoming a way of life, almost half of the forests that once covered the Earth are gone.

Franzén's film Notes from Here (2019) unfolds like a stream of consciousness, in a circular, essayistic narrative. The work is set like a travelogue, connecting two places separated by the Atlantic sea; memories of a trip to São Paulo become present in places Franzén goes to visit in Gothenburg where she lives. The script of the film is informed by stories told by people connected to the various sites. With moving image, text and sound, the work is looking for the workings of language and communication in relation to movement and displacement. Words travel and transform, but sometimes they remain the same and exposes hidden layers of history.

Redheaded (or The beheading of knowledge) (2019) is a short film depicting a conversation between a narrator and a decapitated head of a communist young woman. The two exchange ideas and quotes, connecting the concepts of (French) revolution, (revolutionary) methods of killing, culture and advertising/capitalism. The film was created within the framework of AIR – Artist in Residence Niederösterreich, January-March 2019, Krems an der Donau, Austria.

Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart: The ZAD (2017) focuses on Europe's largest autonomous territory, located close to Nantes in France. The ZAD (zone to defend) emerged from the struggle against a new airport. In 2012 the French state's attempt to evict the zone was fiercely resisted by more than 40,000 people. The police have not set foot there since. Today 250 people in 60 collectives live permanently at the ZAD occupying the wetlands, fields and forests. The ZAD is a successful example of the way resistance and the creation of alternatives need to happen at the same time. While people take back control over their lives with self-organized bakeries, workshops, a brewery, medicinal herb gardens, a rap studio, weekly newspaper and a library, they hinder the construction of an unnecessary, ecologically disastrous airport project. The film is built around a group discussion with activists living at the ZAD.
Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart: Ende Gelände (2016) focuses on the Ende Gelände (end of the road), a massive civil disobedience action at the Lusatia lignite coal fields (near Berlin). 4,000 activists entered an open-cast mine, blocking the loading station and the rail connection to a coal-fired power plant. The blockades disrupted the coal supply and forced the Swedish proprietor Vattenfall to shut the power station down. The action was part of an international "global escalation" against the fossil fuel industry, calling on the world to "Break Free from Fossil Fuels" and putting that imperative directly into practice.
Both films are part of Oliver Ressler's ongoing project Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart that follows the struggles against a fossil fuel dependent economy.

Biographies of objects (2018) explores the possible futures of nationality within the transnational discourse through the prism of quantum physics and technology, while addressing pressing universal and existential questions of humanity in crisis. The work focuses on signifiers of cultural production, and their presence in the construction of national and cultural identity. As diaspora is understood as phenomena that encourages multi-local attachments, the work aims to relate to the digital space of the on-line transnational communities. Biographies of Objects approaches the contemporary ecological crises through linking and interrelating complex and disparate seeming ideas of quantum physics and migration. The work establishes alliances between the particles and the waves of the known universe and the human footprint of Anthropocene, while disclosing the tools (technology) that has been used by the human kind. The work denounces the separation of humanity from its actions and proposes new way of looking for the possible solutions.

Toxic Digits (2019) is a generative audio-visual installation which links the natural processes of the Earth with the accumulation of digital information. The installation highlights the interlocking between digital content and hardware while referring to the geological processes that enable and sustain digital media and remote communications. The material proliferation inherent to the digital encourages an unsustainable speed of resource extraction, energy consumption and waste production. The concealment of the materiality of digital media along with the apparent disembodiment of digital content facilitates the toxic accumulation of e-waste (obsolete digital information and electronic devices). The digital assemblage reacts to audio signals which allude to the co-dependence between human-systems and nature. The form of this digital organism is the result of past communications between software. This imprint or "material memory" compels us to look at the present as a material extension of the past. Nonetheless, the expressiveness of matter exceeds the boundaries of techno-human's systems of knowledge and demands new ethical relations with the plural life systems of the Earth.