Mudhouse Residency fellowship 2024; working in collaboration with artists Lauren Henschel, Jenny Carloin, Max Martin, Danielle Georgiou to create a 16mm film in the Cretan mountains using homemade film developer, brewed using various herbs found in the village.
These images show our exhibition in one on the ruins in
Agios Ioannis, where I burnt dried herbs throughout the screening, in reference to the herbs we used to develop the film.
Jenny:
'...our collaborative team of filmmakers, dancers and sound artists came together under the umbrella of this project. Capturing movement on film between the two dancers, we began to envision the scope of the performance and installation. As soloists, the sense of solitude was heightened by the magnitude of the landscape, with the single performer joined only by their shadow under the harsh Cretan sun. As a duet, the artists moved in tandem, spreading clay over each other’s bodies, both as an act of care and a form of erasure, as on the film the white clay became a shadow in the negative. The artists' explorations into movement, alone and with each other, were performed with the landscape and became inseparable from a sense of place.
Furthering notions of place, the Cretan landscape is infused throughout each element of this work; its plants, minerals, and materials. The 16mm film stock was processed in winenol, a developer made from wine from the local Taverna, and minthymol, a developer made from wild Cretan spearmint. Experimenting with alternative processing, we also developed the film stock with a grassenol formula, using the biochemical properties of Neptunia seagrass, Posidonia Oceanica, after it had washed up on shore, and in a rosemary bath, from the Latin Rosmarinus, meaning “dew of the sea”, taking advantage of the hearty shrub of the mint family, native to the Mediterranean, that grows so mendaciously in the Cretan mountain village of Agios Ioannis. After processing, the film was fixed in the saltwater of the Libyan sea, and tinted with beets grown on the Lasithi plateau and cabbage from its steppes.
The use of analog technology, such as working with 16mm film, and hand processing, is a rejection of the pursuit of the relentlessly new. Deriving processing baths from the earth, or capturing images on celluloid, we enter into an agreement with the physical material. In contrast to the human ideas of efficiency and speed, art mediums predicated on the art of waiting, and involving the natural environment, instead present us with geological time. These “earthly” processes refocus attention on the rhythms of the natural world, and in effect, present other possible ways of being. The film’s ability to record and influence the material works on its celluloid body is both a specific aesthetic choice and an ethics of slowness. There is a shared materiality between the human body and the film body. As filmmaker Babette Mangolte has said, “film has a pulse, an intermittent flicker, a heartbeat.”' - Jenny C.
