Frontiers of Solitude / Film + Discussion

Screening of the film Homeostasis and discussion. The speakers for the debate after the screening are coming from the Czech Republic – Dagmar Šubrtová and Miloš Vojtěchovský – and from Romania – Mihai Gotiu.

The project entitled Frontiers of Solitude focuses on current transformations of the landscape and the close connections between our post-industrial civilization and nature. The aim of these activities is to foster collaboration and an exchange of experiences between individual artists, researchers and initiatives, and to explore and interpret recent and long-term transformations of the landscape.

Homeostasis is a new video documentary about the morphology of the landscape under the Ore Mountain in North Bohemia. It is a collage made from videofootage and field recordings, collected and captured during the international symposium Frontiers of Solitude which took place in this area in the fall of 2015. The area – since the 1950s an intensive open pit lignite mining land – the grey, scarred landscape with dry spruces, pines, oaks, the fossil, petrochemical land with villages disappearing on the open pits, with toxic rivers, forrests without fungi, medows without insects.

It used to be called Black Triangle – the term coined in the 1980s – and covered aproximatelly the borders between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. It became infamous because of its extremely high levels of pollution. For decades, industrially produced air pollutants, water pollution, acid rain and other effects took high toll on the appearance of the environment and the health of the residents. The film is a metaphorical and visual contemplation on the encounter between the sacrified, tortured post-landscape, driven by elements of water, wind, minerals and the heavy mechanisation and penetration as a syndromes of the economy, haunted by consuming and exploatation of fossils.

Důl Vršany, foto: Dagmar Šubrtová, 2015

Authoring: Miloš Votěchovský. Michal Kindernay, cinematography: Dominik Žižka, Vladimír Turner, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Michal Kindernay, video editing: Ondřej Vavrečka, sound editing: Stanislav Abrahám,  Production: Agosto Foundation, 2017

Free entrance.

Facebook event here.

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