The making of the Archival Futures of Outer Space Film Quartet

Ceridwen Dovey, Rowena Potts

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Our joint filmmaking practice is dedicated to making archival experimental films about human relationships with nature and landscapes on Earth and in outer space. We believe that still and moving image archives held within museums, art, scientific and cultural institutions hold significant visual traces of ecological and cultural pasts and memories that can be recombined, reanimated and placed into new conversations that imagine sustainable futures. Our films encourage different ways of feeling as much as seeing, creating eerie and emotional filmic atmospheres that yearn for the perfect strangeness of the past, while stumbling hopefully into the deeper strangeness of the future. It is in this spirit that we call ourselves the Archival Futures Collective and have named our suite of short films the Archival Futures of Outer Space Film Quartet: Moonrise (2021); Musca (2022); Memorabilia (2022); and Requiem (2022).

Underpinning our work is a conviction that archives can be respectfully deployed to tell stories from perspectives that often differ radically from the time in which the material was first produced; and an effort to illuminate evolving relationships between the human and the more-than-human, between living organisms and the environments that support and sustain them. We are most of all motivated by the desire to make video art that generates powerful, sometimes unnameable emotions, ranging from delight to discomfort.
Original languageEnglish
JournalGlobal Media Journal: Australian edition
Volume16
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

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