Conversation Between Collections
Traces et territoires

On April 22, 2021 at 7 pm
Livestream on Facebook and YouTube

This programme is presented one evening only

As part of the dv_vd series, Vidéographe and Dazibao are pleased to dedicate two online screenings to Filmform, under the aegis of Karine Boulanger (Vidéographe), Anna-Karin Larsson and Andreas Bertman (Filmform). In Conversation Between Collections, Vidéographe and Filmform offer a cross-curation of their respective collection, through two new video programmes, Animal Love and Traces et territoires.

This programme, born of a meeting of the two teams in Stockholm in 2018, during which the similarity between the organizations became apparent, is the first collaboration between Filmform (Stockholm) and Vidéographe (Montréal). Founded in 1950, Filmform distributes and conserves a rich collection of international experimental cinema from the 1920s to the present day. Vidéographe, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, continually develops a distribution catalogue of more than 2,300 Quebecois and international titles from the 1970s onwards. The two programmes presented here bring together recent works from their collections based around complementary themes that undoubtedly reflect the current times: Animal Love, curated by Andreas Bertman and Anna-Karin Larsson and Traces et territories, curated by Karine Boulanger.

Programme (78 min.)

The works in this programme explore the traces that human beings leave — or don’t leave — on the territories where they settle, and the effect of their absence, destruction or rediscovery on local history, great or small.

Håkan Dahlström (Sweden)
The Monument (2014) — 17 min. 15 sec., Spanish with English Subtitles

The film humoristically "documents" an excursion into a wooded Andalucian landscape, under the guidance of an elderly female mystic and artist, Maria Larrañaga, in search of a prehistoric monument that she had witnessed in her youth. While this expedition is apparently futile, the filmmakers later stumble onto the stone monument, the year after Maria’s death, just a stone’s throw from where she had originally led them to look. Perhaps this monument, then as now, represents a timely switch to a solar cult after generations of underground reverence? Ultimately, I view El Monumento as a meeting point between the future and the past.
— Sue Anne Moody, Stockholm 2017

Ulrika Sparre (Sweden)
Ear to the Ground (Wandering Rocks) (2020) — 9 min. 4 sec., no dialogue

Ear to the Ground investigates our human search for truth and the conditions of human existence, reflecting on how the artist perceives the land of the desert. Through the use of contact microphones, vibrations from the wandering stones and the deserted landscape are absorbed before returning back to us.

Macha Ovtchinnikova (France-Russia)
The Scar of the Earth (2020) — 10 min. 57 sec., Russian with English subtitles

I follow the tracks of my great-great aunt in Kiev. My mother tells the story; she describes my great-great aunt’s tragic death and reveals a dramatic episode in the history of the Holocaust.

Félix Lamarche (Québec)
Terres fantômes (2019) — 18 min. 38 sec, French with English subtitles

In the 1970s, a new planning policy forced residents of several villages in the interior of Gaspésie (Québec) to leave their homes and to move to the coast. Félix Lamarche explores the consequences of this brutal, disturbing event. While the episode is now largely forgotten, it had a profound impact on those who lived through it. The filmmaker records their stories and recollections, giving them substance through ghostly images of the forests, buildings and landscapes from which they were uprooted. The director’s experimental approach emerges as a unique means to do justice to a bygone era and the people’s deep attachment to their land.

Sophie Vuković (Sweden)
Untitled Abisko (2020) — 19 min. 15 sec., Swedish and English with English Subtitles

A photographer and her lover travel to Abisko in the north of Sweden in the summer of 2020 to document the effects of the rising temperatures on the mountain landscape. Many years later, following a natural disaster, both the landscape and their love are long gone and the world as they knew it lies underwater. From an underwater shelter where she lives with other survivors, the lover lives suspended in an image-world of memories from that summer. She remembers her photographer and the personal disaster that ended their love affair.

Untitled Abisko is a climate-fiction that weaves together a queer love story with the processes of mourning a landscape altered by climate change. In the unique mountain landscape of Abisko, the consequences of global warming are more visible than in other places. While the planet's average temperature has risen by one degree in the past century, Abisko has risen by two degrees. How do we comprehend these changes and the losses that come with them? The striking landscape and the dreamlike, poetic images shot on 16 mm film, stand in stark contrast to the dystopian narrative in a cinematic message from one of our possible futures.

Liselotte Wajstedt (Sweden)
Faces (2008) — 3 min. 29 sec., no dialogue

Sami faces are like landscapes and their faces are integrated into the landscape, making them part of a bigger entity. The music, by Peter Svenzon, is composed of vocals only, without instruments. The film is used in a dance performance, “Sami”, by Charlotte Öfverholm.

Håkan Dahlström

Håkan Dahlström, born in Sweden (1952), has dedicated himself to art since his childhood in Málaga (Spain) where he studied at Picasso’s Art School for ten years. Throughout his youth, he travelled extensively with his parents, whom were both artists (writer Sture Dahlström and painter Anna-Stina Ehrenfeldt).

They lived for a year in the Arizona desert, to which he returned years later in 1974, and filmed the 16mm film Mirror Movement.

His understanding of Nature and Cosmos is vital, observing plants and animals that are present in his work since his beginnings.

He started out as a filmmaker when he found his father´s camera at the age of 14 and in 1967 won the gold medal at UNESCO’s 5th International Contest for Young Filmmakers (Paris). The following years in California (San Fransisco), he lived and worked among other artists in avant-garde circles and participated in the underground film movement, showing his work amongst other places, at the Berkeley Film Archives. Back in Sweden, he won prizes from Swedish Television in 1967, 1968 and 1969. His work has been shown in cinematheques and art centers in Scandinavia, Paris, London as well as on television.

Today he continues filming on video, using different media and also ways to achieve interaction between film, photography and 3-dimensional work.

Ulrika Sparre

Born in 1974, Ulrika Sparre lives and works in Stockholm (Sweden). She applies her artistic practice to multiple media creating installations, sculpture, photography, film performance and sound art.

In recent years, Sparre has exhibited at Färgfabriken, Reykjavik Art Museum, ARTIPELAG, Varbergs konsthall, Steen Projects Gallery and Index Foundation. Additionally, she has performed a number of projects in public spaces. She studied at Konstfack (University College of Arts, Craft and Design) in Stockholm and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

Macha Ovtchinnikova

Macha Ovtchinnikova is a French filmmaker and researcher of Russian origin. With a PhD in cinematic studies, she writes about cinema and contemporary art and teaches the practice and aesthetics of cinema and video art at university level. Her works include Les Variations (2014), a feature-length fiction film, Défaite et victoire du corps (2018), a documentary, and Stigmates de la terre [The scar of the earth] (2020). She is currently working on her next documentary work, Chroniques d'une décennie [Chronicles of a decade], produced by Les Docs du Nord.

Félix Lamarche

Graduated in filmmaking from University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), Félix Lamarche is interested in both new and traditional ways of the art of cinema. He is now exploring the different possibilities in documentary praxis, and its influence on how we perceive the world, the visible and the invisible. Moreover, he tries to elaborate a non-hierarchical creative space during the filming process and an ethic of dialogue between the film and the spectator. He is currently working on his first feature-length documentary.

Sophie Vuković

Sophie Vuković is a filmmaker and artist based in Stockholm (Sweden). Her practice is situated between documentary and fiction, and has previously investigated the construction of identity, intimacy and migration. Her films explore how personal relations and experiences are shaped and affected by social and political structures.

Her short film 09:55-11: 05, Ingrid Ekman (2015) won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. Her feature film debut Shapeshifters (2017) explores migration and belonging beyond national borders in a hybrid documentary form. Shapeshifters was nominated for a number of awards and received critical acclaim in connection with the Swedish cinema release in the fall of 2017. Her films have been shown at film festivals, on television and in cinemas, as well as art exhibition contexts, including at the Barbican Centre and at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where she participated in the Moderna Exhibition 2018. The film installation Mother’s Milk (2019) is her thesis work from the Royal Institute of Art and was awarded a Bonniers Grant.

Liselotte Wajstedt

Based in Stockholm (Sweden), Liselotte Wajstedt is a Sámi multimedia artist from Kiruna (Sweden) whose work spans film and video, collage, painting, photography, sculpture, textiles and installation. Her experimental work with moving image comprises over two dozen shorts and feature-length films. Spanning hybrid documentary, experimental media, music video, dance and fiction films, Wajstedt mobilizes many different styles and techniques in the service of her politics and aesthetics, including animation, claymation, stop-motion and superimposition.

Many of Wajstedt’s films engage explicitly or implicitly with multiple and hybrid subject positions, as is evident in A Sami in the City (2007), Sami Daughter Joik (2008), A Soul in a City (2011), Kiruna Space Road (2013), The Lost One (2014), Kiruna the drift block, Bromsgatan and Kvarteret Ortdrivaren och and The Girl Kiruna (2020). She studied painting and free arts before focusing on video art as well as animation and experimental filmmaking, with special emphasis on documentary storytelling and scriptwriting. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Expression in Convergent Media, 2010 at Gotland University.

Dazibao thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Programme Exploration et déploiement numérique, whose support made possible the online presentation of this event.