Nature

Eiko's first piece without a human.

"Choreography in edit. We humans tend to see some sort of humanness in seeing other species. and that might be human. The aggression and agitation might be in all species in their survival but we might see it as our own nature or what we are particularly dealing with today's world. But there is always beauty and moral in sheer survival."

– Eiko Otake

Camera, sound, and editing by Eiko.

Through the floating garden, into the mountain of signs and chants, arise the path of the winged stone. A stone that used to be a fossil.

This are the scattered fragments, the scattered mineral fragments in its oceanic evolution, an intermittent becoming of geological massiveness. The mineral geology under the spell of an scattered dance. This is the mobilized fossil. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

Water and oil form the undercurrents of all narrations as they activate profound changes in the planetary ecology. After the oil peak, ever dirtier, remote and deeper layers of fossil resources are being accessed. Aerial recording of the devastated crust in Alberta opens the view into dark lubricant geologies. Climate change, exasperated by projects such as the Canadian tar sands, puts the life of large world populations in danger.

Suzanne Anker (b. 1946) is an American visual artist and theorist. Considered a pioneer in the field of Bio Art, her work is situated at the intersection of artistic practice and biological science. Through a concern for genetics, climate change, species extinction, and toxic degradation, Anker draws focus on the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank.’” 

"We Utopians are happy / This will last forever"

Loosely framed by Plato's invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel, Atlantis is a documentary portrait of Utopia -- an island that has never / forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet. Herein is folk song and pagan rite, religious march and reflected temple, the sea that surrounds us all. Even though we are slowly sinking, we are happy and content.