Environment

Everglades is a project Levy began while a resident artist in Florida's Everglades National Park. The unique natural environment of the Everglades has been devastated by decades of wetlands drainage for purposes of industrial and residential development, and today it is threatened by fracking and deep water drilling. At the same time, efforts have been made to restore some of the original ecosystems through a process of re-flooding, not unlike the restoration of Lake Hula in the north of Israel.

Appealing concurrently in this video essay to various meanings of the term “Subatlantic” — a climatic phase beginning 2,500 years ago, as well as the submerged regions of the Atlantic — Biemann immerses her camera deep in oceanic waters to ponder upon the entanglements of geological time with that of human history.

The close collaboration between internationally celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) has yielded an intriguing ethno-trance aesthetic that finds its stunning summa in their much anticipated co-directed feature A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, Spell follows a nameless protagonist — played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A.

A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

The Videofreex tape a group of young people working on a farm run by Chris Locke and his wife in Shandaken, NY.  After learning how to take care of the chickens, they are taught how to kill and pluck one.  Later they sit down for a communal dinner, and one of the group exclaims "Mmmmm, tastes good!"

A silent film essay considers the production of Robert Flaherty's seminal 1922 documentary, Nanook of the North (also known as, A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic). An image by an Inuk artist is discovered “missing” from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) collection.

The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find fortune in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

Through a successful eBay bid in January of 2004, 1975 eteam dollars turned into 10 acres of personal U.S. property. The lot, a generic square within the larger American grid of townships, is located in the desert of Nevada. The closest settlement, Montello, "The town that refuses to die", is eight miles away, and the almost abandoned airbase Wendover, at the edge of the Salt Flats, is located about 30 miles SE. It's the 10-acre lot and its surroundings that started the eteam's search for solutions to problems, which were created by big systems that had made some small mistakes.

This animation short translates Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy - Inferno into a catastrophic narrative about the environment. Incorporating extinct wildlife and vegetation, the animation aims to create a parallel between Dante’s depiction of 9 worlds of hell and the probable outcomes of climate change.

Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.

Pitayas are the sacred Mesoamerican fruits that grow on Mexican nopales, an ancient plant. This is the colorful body, the vibrant blood and the radiant skin of the open life.

 Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.

Presented as a fictional documentary, the sound film All the Time in The World sees the millions of years that have shaped and formed the land, played out at the speed of sound.

Semiconductor have reanimated Northumbria's epic landscape using data recordings from the archives at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. This data of local and distant seismic disturbances has been converted to sound and used to reveal and bring to life the constantly shifting geography around us.

"This movie was collected for four years before being sprayed scattershot over 28 minutes of psychic mayhem. The line between living and dead is a frontier crossed and re-crossed here. The living are dead while the dead are animated, breathing, swimming, giving birth. Consumed by the animal life of the city, the artist undertakes a first person journey, producing diary notes from one of the most skilled lens masters of the new generation. The camera is her company in this duet of death, the instrument that permits her to see the impossible, the unbearable, the invisible."

I reconcile the violent act. Project Gasbuggy pertains to the site where the first of three nuclear bombs were dropped a mile into the earth as part of a government collaboration with natural gas companies to see if nuclear energy could be used to free up natural gas in the earth. As a result of the radiation from each explosion, the land was labeled a dead zone where no harvesting or development of any kind is allowed.

A billboard looming over the 5 Freeway advertised a mortuary called “Eternal Valley.” In Green Valley, California, the road stops, eroded and dysfunctional, but continues to be nothing other than a road.

Camera: Ramzi Hibri, Matthew Lax
Edit: Matthew Lax

Six Indians of different Waimiri and Atroari villages, located in the Amazon, document the day-to-day life of their relatives in the Cacau village. These images transport us to intimate scenes of their lifestyle and their intense relationship with nature.

Directed and photographed by Araduwá Waimiri, Iawusu Waimiri, Kabaha Waimiri, Sanapyty Atroari, Sawá Waimiri, and Wamé Atroari.

Edited by Leonardo Sette.

In Waimiri and Atroari with English subtitles.

Reclamation is a documentary-style imagining of a post-dystopian future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the after-effects of the large-scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. When Indigenous people are left behind after a massive exodus by primarily privileged white settlers who have moved to Mars, the original inhabitants of the land cope by trying to restore and rehabilitate the beautiful planet they belong to.

Memo Mori is a journey through Hackney tracing loss and disappearance. A canoe trip along the canal, the huts of the Manor Garden allotments in Hackney Wick, demolition, relocation, a magical bus tour through the Olympic park and a Hell’s Angel funeral mark a seismic shift in the topography of East London.

The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking.

Strap on your seat belts and get comfortable for a 7,000 mile drive. This documentary invites you to travel along with the Center for Land Use Interpretation as they find suggested photo spots across North America. Journey from coast to coast, stopping long enough to take snap shots of unusual or exemplary land use sites across North America. You will even get to take a picture of Kodak's own waste water treatment plant in Rochester, New York.

The close collaboration between internationally celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) has yielded an intriguing ethno-trance aesthetic that finds its stunning summa in their much anticipated co-directed feature A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, Spell follows a nameless protagonist — played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A.

Forest Law underlines the persistent fact that we are yet to learn to live otherwise in an age defined by the colossal consequences of a new socio-geological order we ourselves have created through irresponsible interactions with Earth’s systems.

As regional character disappears and corporate culture homogenizes our surroundings, it's increasingly hard to tell where you are. In Chain, malls, theme parks, hotels and corporate centers worldwide are joined into one monolithic contemporary "superlandscape" that shapes the lives of two women caught within it. One is a corporate businesswoman set adrift by her corporation while she researches the international theme park industry. The other is a young drifter, living and working illegally on the fringes of a shopping mall.

All that burns melts into air as “All that is solid melts into air” by Marx and Engels brings us to an imaginary of the present time marked by the reality and urgency of global warming.