Join us in the ARoS Public theater for a screening of two new films by Flux Artists-in-Residence.

The Wake

In this program MacEwan will walk audiences through strategies for responding to ecological grief and overwhelm. We will be guided through an empathetic eco-morphic approach to making sense of humanity’s role and responsibilities within the larger network of indwellers with whom we share this planet. The program will begin with a screening of MacEwan’s film ‘The Wake’.

‘The Wake’ (2019) is a performance-art film about environmental grief. In the film, Europe’s largest glacier Vatnajökull is melting and its wisdom teeth have become unrooted. The protagonist attempts to restore the teeth but eventually succumbs to the irreparability of the situation. After all hope is lost, one of the teeth speaks to the protagonist, in Icelandic (voiced by an eight-year-old girl) and offers counsel. The wisdom tooth’s sense of time and memory seem confused, but their capacity for compassion is boundless.

The film screening will be followed by a creative writing workshop. In this workshop MacEwan invites participants to imagine what a personal treaty with the planet might look like. Treaties are written as law binding agreements between two parties or more for the purpose of sharing resources, mutual recognition, and peaceful co-existence. Many of the treaties that exist around the world today that involve colonial entities are routinely breached for corporate and political interest, and the individuals for whom these treaties represent have little power to protest these violations.

In this workshop MacEwan will work with participants to imagine what a personal treaty with the land on which they reside and with our planet might look like. A personal treaty returns agency back to the individual to form their own guidelines for acting in mutual interest with the more-than-human world and honor their own agreements.

Jemila MacEwan is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. MacEwan is known for their intimately interwoven earthworks, sculptures, films and performances that build a contemporary mythology of meteorites, volcanoes, prehistoric super-fungi and melting glaciers. These stories engage with the emotional complexity of humanity’s destructive impact, to the planet and to itself, as a way to understand what it means to be human within the Holocene Extinction.

Nova: A New Spelling of My Name

After “The Wake” we will screen the new short film “Nova: A New Spelling of My Name” to be followed by an in-person Q&A with the director and star of the film Nova Scott-James. A young artist, born Nicole but renamed Nova, sets out on a healing journey on an indigenous Taino sanctuary in upstate New York. Directed by Nova Scott-James; produced by Flor Tejada, Todd Carter, Abou Farman; Cinematography by Flor Tejada.