VDB TV

Beyond the Dust: Colonial Legacy in the Desert

Programmed by Martí Madaula Esquirol | 1983 - 2021 | TRT 55:30

Video Details
Rebecca Baron, Douglas Goodwin | 2008 | 00:10:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 |

We are excited to present the VDB TV program Beyond the Dust: Colonial Legacy in the Desert, programmed by Martí Madaula Esquirol, 2023 - 2024 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Video Data Bank, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation. The program reveals the shape-shifting strategies of colonial regimes across disparate desert contexts. Throughout the presented works, the colonial memory and imagination of the desert – as opportunity or empty space – are evoked or destabilized. Featured artists include Rebecca Baron & Douglas Goodwin, Jesse Drew, Peer Bode, Colectivo Los Ingravidos, and Dana Levy. Martí has written an accompanying essay exploring the program's themes and histories. 

Featured Titles

Lossless #3

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

Dana Levy, Desert Station

In the midst of the 2011 revolution in Cairo, a few beduins listen to their car's radio near Jericho, a place which looks like the end of the world. Within moments this desolated landscape transfers into a busy tourist attraction as a bus full of Polish Pilgrims enter the landscape.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

Camel with Window Memory

"The Camel with Window Memory piece was made one weekend in the early '80's. I pulled out my post card collection and began to look at specific postcards run through the new digital video buffer I had built together with David Jones. The buffer had only one frame of memory but it was real time. It had the capability of displaying the image memory space, either as live or frozen.

Jesse Drew, Newe Sogobia is Not for Sale

Subtitled: The Struggle for Western Shoshone Land Land activists Mary and Carrie Dann confront Federal Bureau of Land Management officers determined to impound the women's livestock until they pay grazing fees on land the Shoshone have never sold or otherwise legally transferred to the U.S. government. Part of an ongoing conflict over who will control ancestral lands in Nevada, this videotape depicts a standoff between the two groups, as activists speak about their ties to the land and their determination to keep it at any cost.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, After América

These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.