On Friday, September 26th, The Film-Makers' Cooperative presents the program Land as Language, guest curated by Coop artist-member Karen Cunningham.

The title Land as Language suggests that land; an area of ground, a region, an island, a field, a hill, a desert, a rock, can be comprehended as a form of communication, a site of knowledge, a place that can be ‘read’ and interpreted.

Land as Language also relates to how a country or nation might invoke land either through its common name (Greenland, The Netherlands, etc.) or through appealing to a form of national or cultural identity (motherland, fatherland, homeland).

The works selected for this screening are, in different ways, concerned with how experiences and concepts of specific areas of land, and lands, are translated through film and moving image practices, especially the interplay between proximity and distance that film works can invoke.

The films in Land as Language share an interest in both human and non-human experiences of time and in bringing these films together - at this point in time - I hope to offer a dialogue on the often-troubled relationships between travel, photography, and place, evoking ways of thinking through processes of undoing, quoting, and delineating.

Program:

Development (2000-2015) Karen Cunningham. 8 minutes, 32 seconds.

Air’s Rock (1985) Takahiko Iimura. 32 minutes.

Mean Time (2020) Karen Cunningham. 9 minutes.

Alluvium (2015) Peggy Ahwesh. 25 minutes.

Apparent Time (2024) Karen Cunningham. 11 minutes.

Development (2000–2015) Karen Cunningham (UK)

Development was filmed from day to night both in, and on the way to the tourist district of Kuta, on the Indonesian Island of Bali in 2000. The footage was edited into this film in 2015.

Two years after this footage was filmed, the Sari nightclub was the site of a major bombing attack which killed over 200 people and is thought to have been carried out in retaliation for Western governments 'war on terror' campaign, which was initiated by the United States following 9/11 and has since been used to justify numerous extreme military actions.

Consisting of hand-held shots, diegetic sound, and text by the artist, segments of the video are filmed in 'night-vision', including Balinese ritualistic dance dramas, Legong dancing (characterised by complex finger movements, footwork, and expressive facial expressions), and dances constructed specifically for tourist audiences. The film ends will an aged stone carving of Ganesha filmed in a cave.

Air’s Rock (1985) Takahiko Iimura (Japan)

One of Iimura’s enduring interests throughout this filmmaking was the concept of a film work that has at its core not motion (as in motion pictures) but stillness, stillness illuminated by light, which is connected to the Japanese word “movie”, which is “eiga” meaning “reflected picture”.

This thinking is perhaps most succinctly expressed in Air’s Rock, a film he made in Australia of Uluru the same year that the rock was symbolically returned to the Anangu people.

The film stresses the idea of the human encounter with the world, with Uluru (a proper noun which thus identifies the rock as a single entity), which stands 318 metres above the ground level of the desert, thus almost without another object to reflect its immense scale.

Even before the ban on walking or climbing Uluru, which can come into effect in 2019, Iimura’s film emphasizes our visual apprehension of the world and its lands over a physical experience of it.

Mean Time (2020) Karen Cunningham (UK)

Mean Time contests that minor forms of photography, (including postcards) have the potential to access instances of undertheorized and overlooked connections capable of expanding and questioning how we understand historic global events, as well as our everyday relationships to the world, travel and time.

‘Mean Time’ is also the calculation of solar time, sometimes referred to as clock time. It is used as the work’s title in relation to the experience of, or feeling about, a certain period of time as being troubled or unjust.

Alluvium (2015) Peggy Ahwesh (USA)

Filmed in Palestine between Ramallah, where Ahwesh lived at the time and Abu Dis, where she worked, Alluvium feels at once meandering “we do not move in one direction rather we move back and forth” and astute, situated but also out of time, calling forth as it does the undead, the Palestinian people existing in a state between states.

The film's title pointedly refers to a type of soil, particularly the loose sediments deposited by rivers and waterways, which is highly fertile and thus, as Ahwesh emphasizes, “alluvial soil is in the West Bank. That’s one of the reasons Israelis want to take it”.

Apparent Time (2024) Karen Cunningham (UK)

Formed from a handful of archival photographs, slides, and postcards, footage of the un-doing of a piece of woven fabric, and the erasure of a tattoo.

The film’s central subject is a photograph titled, 'Photo 9 - Boat on the spot where Elugelab once stood, now a crater, 1972’ taken in Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 20 years after the nuclear device ‘Mike’ was detonated there, completely vaporising the island of Elugelab.

‘Apparent Time’ is also the act of measuring time by observing the shadows cast on a surface produced by the sun’s rays falling onto an object.