SOFT GEOGRAPHIES
2024 | Performance, 16mm Film, Eco-Processing, Sound Design, Installation
Collaborators/ contributors: Lauren Henschel, Matilda Butler, Max Martin, Danielle Georgiou, Victoria Pham
As participating artists-in-residence at the Mudhouse Residency in the Cretan mountain village of Agios Ioannis, our collaborative team of filmmakers, dancers and sound artists came together under the umbrella of this project, "Soft Geographies". Capturing movement on film between the two dancers, we began to envision the scope of the performance and installation. As soloists, the sense of solitude was heightened by the magnitude of the landscape, with the single performer joined only by their shadow under the harsh Cretan sun. As a duet, the artists moved in tandem, spreading clay over each other’s bodies, both as an act of care and a form of erasure, as on the film the white clay became a shadow in the negative. The artists' explorations into movement, alone and with each other, were performed with the landscape and became inseparable from a sense of place.
The first iteration of the work was shown at the Mudhouse Residency in Crete. The village of Agios Ioannis, located on the southern side of the Greek island of Crete, dates back to the 15th century. We installed the projector in one of the village’s stone and mud structures that has fallen into ruins, along with an Archimedean laboratory of colorful glass vials and jars filled with our processing baths and tinting agents, fresh and dried herbs, strips of test films, notebooks of recipes, a lupe on a lightbox, and lanterns illuminating the crumbling interior. The projector’s throw reached the far wall of the twin interior, and for the screening we loaded the 100’ daylight spools onto the Eiki SL-0 projector in rapid succession. Echoing around the room from hidden microphones was a soundscape of field recordings and a recitation of a Greek poem. Audience members took turns peering in through the windows or walking around the tiny space, pressed against the walls or crouched on the floor to avoid the projector’s beam.
