A Siberian Poetics of Extinction in Cinema
@ Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
40 Arts Circle Dr, Evanston, IL 60208
Opening Thursday, May 18th, at 7PM
A Siberian Poetics of Extinction in Cinema
(Various artists, 2020-2021, digital, approx. 83 mins)
This program brings together two films by the Belgian filmmaker Liesbeth De Ceulaer and Canadian-Mongolian artist Alisi Telengut that foreground Mongolian and Siberian Indigenous livelihoods and cosmologies in the age of environmental change and degradation. THE FOURFOLD (dir. Alisi Telengut, 2020) is a short animation film, based on ancient animistic beliefs and shamanic rituals in Mongolia and Siberia that explores Indigenous worldview and attempts to reclaim animist ideas on a planetary scale. HOLGUT (dir. Liesbeth De Ceulaer, 2021) is set in the Arctic landscapes of northern Siberia in the Sakha Republic. In a style that poetically blends documentary, myth, and fiction, De Ceulaer ruminates upon the consequences of postcolonial environmental degradation through the eyes of three protagonists – hunters Roman and his brother Kyym, and the scientist Semyon. As permafrost thaws in the Siberian tundra, fossils of extinct mammoths come to light, while wild reindeer incrementally disappear, altering the lives of Indigenous communities residing in the region. Blending documentary and fiction, HOLGUT is a poetic and speculative contemplation upon the possibilities of life in postcolonial landscapes of ruin in the contemporary moment. Both works, in their different ways, point to the mutual co-entanglement of humans and nonhumans, mapping out alternative forms of living in the land of thawing ice and environmental degradation.
Films:
THE FOURFOLD dir. by Alisi Telengut
(2020, 8 min, digital)
HOLGUT dir. Liesbeth De Ceulaer
(2021, 75 min, digital)
The screening will be accompanied with a 15 min Q&A with the directors Alisi Telengut and Liesbeth De Ceulaer, which will be added to the Block Cinema website for the viewers to access.
Guest curated by Maria Romanova (PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies).
Presented with support from the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern.
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Tags: A Siberian Poetics of Extinction in Cinema, Alisi Telengut.Liesbeth De Ceulaer, Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Maria Romanova, Northwestern University
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