Join us for a screening of films by artists Adrián Balseca, Emily McFarland and Nollaig Molloy on Friday 21 June 2024, 6-8pm at Nerve Centre, 7-8 Magazine Street, BT48 6HJ.
Entranced Earth: on film, extraction and land brings together three films that consider the value of labour and impact of human actions within our land, through explorations into extractive mining practices of the earth’s natural resources including obsidian, gold and salt. Through archival material and collective memory, each film references a relationship with our land that’s based on use, our resources an apparatus for colonial and capitalist ideologies.
Find out more about the films below:
- 🪨 Adrián Balseca, In Praise of Darkness
Deep in Ecuador’s Mullumica Valley, figures are busy extracting obsidian, an opaque volcanic rock. The rock then begins its metamorphosis, transported from the quarry to the pristine confines of a laboratory where it takes on its ultimate role – as a replacement for the director’s artificial eye. A mineral chronicle charting the course of healing.
- 🪨 Emily McFarland, Curraghinalt
Curraghinalt is the first work in a three-part video series (“Dtan-a-goo-saran-dthu (The Wind’s Changed”) that explores the changing ecology of a particular landscape in the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, in the North of Ireland. This single-channel video, which utilises documentary forms, dislocated sound, and voices and images that are woven together, explores collective memory and moments of testimony from individual members of a small rural community based at the Greencastle Peoples Office – a collection of caravans high in the mountains that overlook a valley of farmland. The camp coalesced in early 2018 in response to plans that Dalradian Gold Limited submitted to The Department for Infrastructure in the North of Ireland.
The sequence follows a conversation with community members including farmers, lorry drivers, engineers and retired people, at the Greencastle Peoples Office in 2019 on day 387 of their occupation of land acquired by the mining company. This dialogue, which shifts between shared experiences and personal accounts, converges with wider questions of solidarity, political representation, sovereignty, the circulation of capital, ideologies of capitalism and particular legacies of historical colonialism.
- 🪨 Nollaig Molloy, Worth Your Salt
Worth Your Salt comes from a phrase used when describing someone of value or someone who is a good worker. The film comprises of digital and analogue moving image with segments of stop motion animations centred around the material of rock salt which the artist has collected from a working salt mine in Northern Ireland. Using a combination of digital and Super 8mm film footage, Nollaig collaborated with a contemporary dancer, fiddle player and stone carver.
The film is a visual essay exploring industry, craft, gestural movements and language associated with the material of salt. The structure of the film looks at a sense of time, geologically and a sense of time within the frames of moving image, while drawing attention to the value of labour, mass produced objects and natural resources.