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Contemporary Art

The Magic Shoe

The Magic Shoe

Florian Guillaume Discover the Magic Shoe’s fantastical journey in search of its lost twin, where it lives an adventure like no other shoe before! Episode Four: While sailing away on its umbrella boat, the Magic Shoe gets swallowed by the unpredictable tide of Venice! This new episode of the series relies on traditional, hand-drawn animation combined with post-production effects. Concept to completion required three years of work.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Religio

Religio

Flora Pesenti Contemplating the sense of plenitude we feel communing with nature, RELIGO, from the Latin verb to bind, questions our relationship with the environment and a possible connection that binds all living beings.

Duration : 27m
Maturity Level : all

Hibakujumoku

Hibakujumoku

As fire ravages the countryside creating an apocalyptic atmosphere, on the shores of the sea bathers watch the hypnotic ballet of Canadair aircraft coming to fill up with water. A eucalyptus tree whispers about its power of resilience in the face of climate changes which are disrupting the planet. ‘Hibakujumoku’ in Japanese designates the trees which have survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of these is a eucalyptus tree. The Eucalyptus is also a tree which has over the course of millenia developed strategies of survival and adaptation in the face of fires. It has become a pyrophyte. By HHYBRYDD

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all

Uninhabitable

Uninhabitable

Jessica Tan When Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change, a single dragonfly must fight seemingly insurmountable odds in order to survive and reproduce.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Kõverdama

Kõverdama

Karl Kaisel grew up in Estonia in a peatland forest called Kõverdama. At the moment Kõverdama is being prepared to be cut down by a mining company with the goal of expanding the peat extraction for the production of gardening soils. The film consists of broken and incomplete 3D scans of beings from Kõverdama. They tell stories of the place that used to be, is, and will be. In this work, ghosts of trees float above the destroyed landscapes, flowers grow in punctured spaces, and memories creeping in the broken world. It’s clear that a forest cannot be reduced to numbers and pictures, a few species or resources. If the destruction is done the result is this haunting presence.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

The World will change

The World will change

In an increasingly complex and difficult world, in which apocalyptic scenarios begin to glimpse that seem to question the very survival of humanity, the video reverses the common experience of natural data, proposing itself as a metaphor for urgent and necessary change. By Marco Coraggio

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Antarctic Traces

Antarctic Traces

Michaela Grill Approaching the mysterious, inaccessible realm via the few traces that are currently available. At the same time, revolving around the desolation and devastation that humans have left in their treatment of it. Michaela Grill devotes herself to these two tasks in Antarctic Traces, a splendid, thoroughly composed study of the most mysterious of all continents, or rather, the supplements of it that are accessible. For one, there is the rough landscape of the coast of South Georgia, a group of islands located off of Antarctica, which Grill examines in what are mainly still frames. For another are the (largely black-and-white) archive images in which the thematic focus of the film, the history of whaling since the late nineteenth century, are historically embedded. And there is also a narrative elaborately woven from numerous literary sources, spoken from off screen and interlaced with subtle sound inserts, that allows this highly abject episode in humanity´s exploitation of nature to become present: the industrial slaughter of seals, sea elephants, and primarily whales until into the 1970s, which took its brutal course in the waters of the south Atlantic. In an alternating rhythm of still images, minimally moving pictures, and individual camera pans, Antarctic Tracess divulges a mosaic-like tableau of a "dead, chilly world": glaciers, skeletons, industrial ruins, and rusted ships bear witness to the uncompromising eagerness for power of the "whaling industry." Presently populating the landscape of "scarred" wasteland are penguins and seals as hangers-on who just won´t die. As a whole, Antarctic Traces creates a disturbing portrait of a deadly peace that humans have caused in a remote area of the earth and seas. Traces of a ruinous freedom, which is profoundly rooted in nothing. (Christian Höller)

Duration : 29m
Maturity Level : all

Litus Minor

Litus Minor

Oscar Valenzin Lio Piccolo is a town in the Venetian Lagoon, in the Municipality of Cavallino Treporti. It is sometimes referred to as an island, although it is rather a set of islets separated by narrow channels. Archipelagos rich in primordial life forms such as cyanobacteria, which in these waters find a prolific environment towards the end of summer where they can reach high concentrations, causing characteristic "blooms".

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Under the reefs orchestra - Sakurajima

Under the reefs orchestra - Sakurajima

In the south of Japan, a small town named Kagoshima faces the Sakurajima volcano. This volcano regularly erupts ashes and lava flows. The inhabitants of the city take out all their umbrellas, to protect themselves from the ash rain, while continuing their daily activities. This clip, entirely made from traditional collages, will turn around this motif: a civilization petrified in its daily life facing an agonizing nature. Will the demiurge artist manage to save humanity? By David Delruelle&Yoann STEHR (SUPER TCHIP)

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

TREN-TREN Y KAY-KAY - Mapuche cosmogonic myth

TREN-TREN Y KAY-KAY - Mapuche cosmogonic myth

Camilo Rodriguez In this Mapuche myth, the powerful serpents TREN-TREN and KAI-KAI, daughters of the pillanes, protect the earth, highlighting the destructive relationship between human beings and environment. KAI-KAI reacts to the destruction of nature perpetrated by men. Faced with requests for help, TREN TREN confronts him to protect them and seek a new balance. This short film is part of the movie “Namunmu Zomo - Mujer de pie” about the life of Luisa Calcumil.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

#ArtSpeaksOut

#ArtSpeaksOut

From 6th November and during the 2 weeks of COP27, please visit every other day the [Channel page, https://ikonotv.art/Channels] where you will be able to watch a big choice of video artworks all focused on environmental issues. Let’s get inspiration for our environment.

Duration : 26s
Maturity Level : all

The Frontier Is Everywhere

The Frontier Is Everywhere

Damodar Joglekar Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Fleeting Moments

Fleeting Moments

This video work by Nina Sabnani and Srilekha Sikander is composed of moments. Each image represents a moment, or several moments that are really a single moment spread across 40 years. Each image is a scene from a season, from a monsoon descending over coastal lands and the sea. Every monsoon, the image returns. Every few moments, it changes. The artists are pushed to create multiple images to represent a single moment. And to put them all together on a single page. The cyclical nature of the work is part of its origin. It is based on journeys made to and fro, between Bombay and Murud-Janjira, by the artist, Srilekha Sikander over a period of forty years. Each journey is a repetition of another journey like every monsoon is a memory of another monsoon. Each season, the same scene, the same sea, repeats itself, but in a new form. Time stands still, even as it moves. Movement and stillness are blended together – separate and balanced. Perhaps this is what the Greeks called karyological time. The time that is momentary, both still and moving, like water in a lake.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

The Lost Lullaby

The Lost Lullaby

The Lost Lullaby is a vision of Fauzia Minallah for a better future for our world. We have to bring back the lost lullabies of our beautiful Mother Nature.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

#ArtSpeaksOut

#ArtSpeaksOut

One more week, until December 4, 2022, meaning 2 weeks following COP27, please visit [Channel page, https://ikonotv.art/Channels] where you are able to watch a big choice of video artworks all focused on environmental issues within six dedicated channels. Let’s get inspiration for our environment.

Duration : 21s
Maturity Level : all

Time God

Time God

Time God by Alexandra Mas is the indignation of Nature, that appears here to show the disasters produced by human activity and punish them. It is a breath, a divine spirit wearing the gold as an armor and as an ultimate try to make human see its furry and hallow pain. The gold, metal, supple raw material, carries here a double meaning of divinity and primitive being.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Iconoplast

Iconoplast

Sara Bonaventura Imagine alien visitors arriving on Earth in the remote future.” Jan Zalasiewicz’s The Earth after us, and the seminal Lynn Margulis’ Microcosmos inspired this mockumentary (e.g. the voice over, a re-adaptation of them, where past tense verbs are turned into future tense, embedding the fantasy of a future already set as past). The idea that symbiosis, the living together and sometimes merging of different species of organisms, is crucial to the evolution of life forms on Earth, is the underpinning concept of this work.

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all

The White

The White

Ian Gibbins "At sea-rim, sky-base, afloat somewhere between head (bone-dense) and shoulder, between blink or flinch and occasional shrug: the thick inward draw and effort of gyre, draught, push, pulse, pull… gar, mako, kraken... under threat of claw, spine, barb... flensed to wind spume, brawn paled to cloud roll..." Moored at portside, we ponder the uncertainty of what lies ahead. We know there are dangers: the ocean, quiet for now; impenetrable fogs; beasts watching us, lurking in anticipation; perhaps only the monsters of our imagination, the destruction wrought by our greed and disregard for the natural world.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

ECO

ECO

Francesca Leoni A new species, aborigines of the future, guardians of a rebirth created by a post-pandemic and post-war period, who are once again trying to take care of an artificial garden. The cyclical nature and violence of nature require a last gesture of hope, which travels beyond the artificial barrier, dissolving in an ECO that will never end. Because "The earth will survive, but" perhaps "it will no longer be of the human species."

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Life is a two-way dream

Life is a two-way dream

The movie of Gjert Rognli shows the way in a world undergoing rapid change, with polarization and globalization going in many directions. We are in an age marked by adoration of youth, fixation on the present and extreme individualism. What we do today will affect the way people live in the future. The wisdom from the shaman’s worldview from The Old Sámi Religion helps weave together another interpretation and story. Original film title "Eallin lea guovttesuorat niehku".

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all

El Bosque Encarnado

El Bosque Encarnado

The other side of rising sea levels is drought. In this collaborative film, David Cass & Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero see the aftermath of a forest fire in southern Spain. As the climate crisis worsens, scenes such as this will become ever more common, as arid regions become ever drier.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

Perpetual Snow: Chapter I

Perpetual Snow: Chapter I

‘Perpetual Snow’ is an ongoing project by Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero that includes performance, video, photography, and installation. It highlights the ephemeral nature of our environment, particularly now, in the context of climate breakdown, where the concept of “perpetual snow” is being challenged by global warming. The piece is formed by multiple layers of snow collected in New York City in various moments in time, starting with the last snow of 2021 in NYC. Stored in the freezer, this snow becomes artificially perpetual and it lasts year after year. Perpetual Snow: Chapter I’ is the first film in the series and it documents the first stages of the piece.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

Río

Río

Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero contemplates the interaction between the flow of a river, its wildlife, and the sunlight. Although it is just a few inches deep, the river contains a busy and multilayered life. The close-ups show pondskaters, fish, tadpoles, and leaves… They all move in changing directions, swimming or floating in the water, which is practically invisible despite being what makes a river’s intricate life possible. The film highlights details of a river that could easily be overlooked, but which reveal the vast richness of our vital, life-giving rivers, which our very lives depend upon.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

Where Once The Waters

Where Once The Waters

‘Where Once the Waters’, created for the 59th Venice Biennale of Art, is an evolution of Cass’ creative responses to the issue of rising sea levels. The final exhibition is formed of two installation artworks, one wall of 365 sea paintings upon antique tins & boxes; one wall of letters, written to people around the world, explaining changes in sea levels at the coasts closest to their birthplaces.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all