Deborah Stratman: Last Things (2023)
@ Watershed Art & Ecology
1821 S Racine Ave, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Wednesday, April 24th, from 6PM - 8PM
Camera Trappings is a series of screenings and accompanying discussions which zooms in/out on histories of animal and landscape photography, zoological space, Hollywood’s naturalization of animal images, and nature capture cams in order to examine the ways they frame our gaze towards animals, and by extension, ourselves. Through a collection of film, video, and text-based works it asks: is it possible to film the natural world through a nonhuman lens? What filmic conventions aid, or hinder, in doing so? What is the camera’s role in shaping humans’ gaze towards animals in the first place?
On April 24th, Deborah Stratman joins the conversation with a screening of Last Things (2023), a geological survey of filmmaking’s terrain as a possible medium for displacing the anthropocentric point of view. With an intertextual weaving of natural, prehistoric and speculative material—such as Roger Caillois’ writing on stones, Robert Hazen’s theory of “Mineral Evolution,” Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, the symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, multi-species scenarios of Donna Haraway, Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy—the film offers a lithic proposal for displacing humankind and human agency when storytelling nonhuman histories. In this case, imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future.
Official Website
More events on this date
Tags: Chicago, Deborah Stratman, Deborah Stratman: Last Things (2023), Lower West Side, Watershed Art & Ecology
« previous event
next event »