When Ears Speak Volumes
We’re back in-person!
Friday, September 2, 2022 @ 7:00 PM
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust St, Milwaukee, WI 53212
Join us for the screening and conversation afterward! Woodland Pattern’s in-person events are still operating on a limited attendance capacity policy of 20 seats max at the moment, so please check in before attending the event. We’re so excited to see you all back in the space!
Don’t forget to browse the physical bookstore, or make a purchase online to support Woodland Pattern!
Vi Vit! | Sara Lovering | 2 min 45 sec | 2020
Synopsis
Vi Vit! is a playful ode to Arno Méry featuring Cicero’s Catilinae Orations from 63AD.
Artist Bio
Sara Lovering explores imagined dichotomies through the framework of film, video, and photo. Mutation of the rigid structure found in subject/object relationships and binaries of gender and sexuality are common themes that permeate through the media of this Berlin-based artist. Lovering is from Seattle, WA and studied Film/Video at Pratt Insitute in Brooklyn, NY.
Lovering’s work has been exhibited at Microscope Gallery (NYC), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Die Fabrik (Berlin), Galeria Zé dos Bois (Lisbon), Museum der Bildende Kunst (Leipzig), Seattle Art Museum, and Tacoma Art Museum.
Hormigas + Venus Atrapamoscas | Victoria Baraga | 6 min 26 sec | 2016
Synopsis
I forgot some cookies on the garden table and in a few minutes it was full of ants. At that time I was obsessed with filming small things, discovering micro worlds, so I stayed for hours watching them. A few days before I had bought a carnivorous plant in Parque Los Andes, so I was curious to see how it behaved. A friend told me that I had made a miniature snuff movie and it made me laugh.
Filmed with a Canon 60 D camera and a diy macro (a 50mm plus an inverted 35mm joined by a PVC thread turned by Diego Dubatti)
Being this way, the focus was very sensitive and you had to enter a zen state and breathe softly and slowly so as not to lose it.
2016 // Buenos Aires, Argentina
Audio: Victoria Baraga and Hernán Hayet
Artist Bio
Textile artist // Photographer // I make music at lespan.bandcamp.com Currently in Rio Ceballos, Cordoba
The Quiet Ones | Marianne Hoffmeister Castro | 22 min 45 sec | 2021-2022
Synopsis
The Quiet Ones examines the complex trajectories of nonhuman instrumentalization through the stories and perspectives of one of the most frequently used model organisms for scientific research, mice. In collaboration with the collection of taxidermied mice models at the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh, this video portrays a story of tender and haunting affects between C57 Black mouse, Ribfull and
Ribless Mouse Embryos, Mouse Balb/cJ, C57 Black Mouse Obese, DBA Mice, Alcoholic Rat, and a human that cares for them. With the spirit of a fable and utilizing diverse narrative registers that range from the poetic, the humorous, the anthropomorphic, and the sentimental, the piece brings forth the intricate origins of the mice and the regimes of labor, objectification, and violence in which they are embedded. The simple gestures of cleaning and care towards the mice summons them back to the realm of the living, and directs our attention to the unfathomable consequences of the production of knowledge: it unveils the limbo in which these nonhuman animals inhabit as objects, ghosts, and cultural artifacts. In this piece, language also operates as a form of care, but also as a critical tool that reflects back at us. It reveals the underlying dynamics of dominion and instrumentalization of these beings that have been intentionally bred and genetically modified for the utilization of their bodies and the extraction of their vitality. But also, language prompts a reconsideration of the ways we treat nonhuman animals, and perhaps it can envisage other modes of relation with them.
Artist Bio
Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (1989, Chile) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose work examines the representation of nature and the construction of animality in our contemporary western world. Working with video, drawing, installation and writing, her research brings attention to the ways that nature and nonhuman beings are represented in visual culture but also to the complex and contradictory ways we relate to them. By utilizing diverse registers and focusing on non-anthropocentric storytelling, she imagines new iconographies of empathy and cohabitation in an era of ecological and existential crisis.
Marianne holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2022) and a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2014). She has exhibited and screened video work in Chile, United States, Ecuador, Peru, Switzerland, Corea and participated in diverse international residency programs such as Cow House Studios, Ireland (2017); NWOSU, United States / Molten Capital, Chile, (2018); Bibliothek Andreas Züst, Switzerland (2018); Pimoa Cthulhu, First Tentacular Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies, Madrid (2020) and Mother’s Milk in Kansas, United States (2021). Currently, she is the St. Elmo Fellow (2022-2023) at UT Austin and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and resident for Animalia (2022-2023), part of the residency program Núcleo de Lenguaje y Creación at Universidad de las Américas, Santiago, Chile. Marianne is currently based in Austin, USA.
Mirror Test | Duncan Marquiss | 6 min 10 sec | 2020
Synopsis
In Mirror Test, a jackdaw explores a domestic interior, flitting between shelves and disrupting kitchen counters. Images of the bird exploring her environment are accompanied by an interview with Kerstin and Stephan Voigt, former residents of East Germany who live with the jackdaw. Their conversation ranges from speculations on animal intelligence to ambivalent recollections of the reunification of Germany in 1990, recalling double lives within the GDR and the self-contradictions of capitalist democracy that consumed the East.
The ‘mirror test’ is a behavioural science experiment in which an animal is presented with a mirror to see if they recognise their own reflection, or mistake the image for another animal. Corvid birds such as magpies and jackdaws have reportedly passed this test, yet it remains uncertain if the experiment is proves self-awareness. In the cinema the projection screen often presents reflections on human behaviour. The jackdaw in Mirror Test is elusive and inscrutable, observing her makes us wonder about the inner life of other minds, whether human or avian.
Artist Bio
Duncan Marquiss is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland, who works with video, drawing and music. His work explores overlaps between biology and culture.
Marquiss graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005 and undertook the LUX Associate Artist Programme, London in 2009. He was the recipient of the Margaret Tait Award 2015-16. Recent exhibitions include Stalking The Image: Margaret Tait & Her Legacy, GoMA, Glasgow, 2019 and a solo exhibition, Copying Errors, at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2016. Recent screenings include Experimenta at London Film Festival (2018), Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (2018) and Kochi Muziris Biennale, India (2017).
Corridor | Inés Garcia | 2 min 31 sec | 2017
Synopsis
CORRIDOR is a single sequence that evolves in constant movement, framing and direction. A vanishing point that gradually becomes an arrival, thus irrevocably implies disappearance.
A displacement that appeals to experience, to the reciprocity between the individual and space. A letting go that finally dissolves into a fade to white.
Artist Bio
Inés García is an artist and filmmaker. She has participated in workshops taught by Cristina Iglesias, Abbas Kiarostami, Víctor Erice, Gabriel Orozco, Wilfredo Prieto and Laida Lertxundi.
She has taken part in several exhibitions such as El Verb Harmònic at La Panera in Lleida, NEW SPAIN at the Solar Gallery in Vila do Conde, and in various venues in Barcelona, Madrid and Bilbao.
Her videos and films have been screened in various festivals such as DOCUMENTAMADRID, ZINEBI, Punto de Vista, LOOP, KurzFilm Oberhausen or Les Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin, the Latin Video Art Festival in New York, the Tehran Film Festival and FIVA in Buenos Aires. Aires, and other cities such as Lisbon, Athens, Montreal and Nottingham. As well as in contemporary art centers such as CA2M, Tabakalera, MARCO in Vigo and La Conservera in Murcia, among others.
She has received grants and scholarships from BilbaoArte Foundation, Eremuak, Diputación de Bizkaia and the Santander Creativa Foundation.