Terra Nova

Programme

• 

  Solo la Luna Comprenderá (Only the Moon Will Contain Us) (Kim Torres, CR 2023, 18’)

  As a magical moon creeps in the twilight, different timelines entwine in the town of Manzanillo, located in the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The youth and the elderly collide in a tale where the town is able to exist as it is: both beautiful and forgotten, mysterious and monotonous. As if in a dream or a memory, mixing a documentary style and science fiction, this story is a search for the complexities of what it means to grow up in a place like Manzanillo.

• 

  Ida Western Exile (Courtney Stephens, US 2014, 9’)

  Mixing the fantasy of Westward travel with the artistic spirit of Georgia O’Keeffe, the film focuses on women who go in search of solitude. Stephens explores what this sort of isolation might look like for a woman living in today’s world of information overload.
  
  A freight train rolls through the dusty yellow expanses of the valley, mountains and rock formations lingering in the distance, as the protagonist expresses a desire to disappear in plain sight, a speck in the midst of this open, empty space.

• 

  The Sounds of Cannons (Tuan Andrew Nguyen, VN 2021, 10’)

  The bombing of several regions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Vietnam War (1955 to 1975) by the United States Armed Forces—what is considered the largest aerial bombardment in human history—left hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordnances hidden underground.
  
  The film follows one of the unexploded ordnances and gives it a voice through an animistic transformation. From its drop, to its detonation in the rainforests of Vietnam, it offers closure to a menacing narrative that had been on hold for decades.

• 

  Live: Aerology - Of Clouds, Air, Chemtrails and Condensation (30')

  A divinatory reading of shifting shapes in the sky. An 'opening ritual' to guide us through Terra Incognita, an expanded cinema performance to be revealed on site.

• 

  Bio: Daniella Valz Gen

  Process-led, Daniella Valz Gen’s work explores poetic experience through different forms of reading, writing, performing and making. They’re invested in a relational and responsive approach to land, place, and the other-than-human. Born in Peru and based in London, Valz Gen’s work highlights the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems as areas where potential new meanings can arise.
  
  Valz Gen’s work has been shown at Glasgow International, SPILL Festival, Aichi Triennale, Gropius Bau among others. Subversive Economies, their first poetry collection, was published by PSS Press in 2018. Their writing has been featured in The Happy Hypocrite, Map Magazine, Salt, and others. They are currently Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, London.