How to Listen to the Land
Étienne de France
A screening and artist talk with Étienne de France brings together two films that listen closely to landscapes shaped by conflict, memory and imagination.
Against the Drought of Signs turns to the forests of the Araucanía region in Chile, where industrial monoculture and ongoing territorial struggles have profoundly transformed the land. Attentive scenes of woodland environments invite another way of encountering the forest – not simply as a resource, but as a site of relation. Through the notion of mimesis, gestures of light, movement and atmosphere suggest forms of expression that move alongside, and sometimes beyond, language.
In The Telling of the Stones, de France draws on the friendship between Édouard Glissant and Thor Vilhjálmsson to imagine a speculative poem-novel moving across time and terrain. A Kalinago woman – an Indigenous people of the Caribbean basin – fleeing colonial violence follows spirit stones toward northern volcanic islands, while elsewhere two men traverse the Icelandic plains recalling legends of inscriptions carved into desert rock. Stones appear as archives, guides and voices, carrying fragments of language, memory and survival across landscapes far apart.
What else is on Thursday?
Check the timetable to visit more programmes with your Festival Pass (5-days) or Day Pass (1-day). With the passes you can also visit the festival exhibition Techno-Ancestrality at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and BAK Basecamp.
Thursday day pass 5-day festival pass
For more information on the festival tickets please see here