SUNDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
(This event is $10.)

What hides behind the veil of infrastructure, invisibly regulated by larger systems of power? Emilija Škarnulytė’s work looks into core questions undergirding the current geological period, wherein human activity continues to produce un-ignorable, worldwide ecological problems. For ONE NIGHT ONLY, the globetrotting Lithuanian filmmaker and installation artist will be at Spectacle for a screening of recent works centered on industry and environment, shot in a variety of locations the likes of which she is clearly obsessed: power plants, underwater research stations, the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino observatory in Japan, or the island of Spitsbergen (located in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalsbard, where the Europe meets the Arctic.)

In her works, Škarnulytė is concerned with the phenomena of neoliberal capitalism so massively distributed across ecosystems that they redefine the traditional notions of thing/place, what cultural critic Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”. While playful – perhaps no more so than when she turns herself into a mermaid, or “woman-torpedo”, to swim into a decommissioned NATO submarine base in SIRENOMELIA – Škarnulytė’s short films interrogate the role of people to their new landscapes and (crucially) questions of what happens in the coming strata, after those roles have served their intended purposes.

“My work poses indirect questions. It could be seen as an archaeological expedition into the future, often into inaccessible places: closed empty nuclear reactors, submarine bases, power plants, mines. These places have no humans, there are only artefacts and remains left. Indirect questions are raised, analyzing human activity and invisible structures, trying to make them visible, though not through political activism, but on the basis of mythology… The geological structure remains, observing one stratum of the Earth after another, starting with aerial shots, approaching the ground, going underground, and moving to a microscopic level. It is an inner cross-section of the modern world, opening and flooding with the topics of human violence, desire, greed.” – Emilija Škarnulytė

Programmed in collaboration with Lukas Brašiškis (New York University).