Kawchu otherwise known as the crying tree, Papaver somniferum aka opium poppy, Musa — the flower of the banana tree — cacti and lilies are the main protagonists of the films in this programme. In these works, the plants are not products nor objects, but mediators between the past and the present, and between virtual and material realities.
Adrián Balseca’s seemingly minimal silent film The Skin of Labour is loaded with historic and political memories. While evoking the imprint of human kind on nature, it also refers to the rubber extraction slavery and genocides that occurred between 1879 and 1912 in the Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Brazilian and Colombian Amazon.
Jodie Mack’s Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant reunites computational waste with the plant from which opium, morphine, codeine and heroin are made. In the artist’s words, ’a eulogy for wasted potential sends the out-of-date to the out-of-body: trash to treasure’.
Taking a different approach, Minia Biabiany's Musa addresses colonial violence imposed on women’s bodies and sexualities. Past and present gendered violence also haunts Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ Coyolxauhqui, a free jazz audiovisual composition in which the cacti of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán valley seem to be the only witnesses of femicide.
Kent Chan’s Tremors, a film produced at the Calcutta Botanic Garden, unfolds tableaux of visitors who have consented to pose for several minutes. This eerie protocol leads to a durational film recalling botanical and taxonomical monochrome engravings, while re-enacting a trope of early cinema: mise-en-scène with people posing in front of human-made vegetal backdrops, imposing their hierarchical importance.
The programme is bookended with two works by Lawrence Lek. Both are social and ecological speculations that re-imagine other futures from altered pasts. His short video Temple Lily evokes the plant of the same name, which ‘evolved in darkness, and draws on the vibrational energy of sound rather than light’. As if to conjure the ambivalent power of all psychotropic plants and their histories of both bloodshed and medicine, his sonic work Dead Souls images a nightclub thriving after human extinction: ‘a sonic architecture filled only with ghosts’.
Programme
- Lawrence Lek Temple Lily 2020. Digital video, colour, silent, 1 min
- Kent Chan Tremors 2021. Digital video, black and white and colour, sound, 23 min
- Jodie Mack Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant 2017. 16 mm film, colour, silent, 4 min
- Minia Biabiany Musa 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 14 min, captioned
- Adrián Balseca The Skin of Labour 2016. 16 mm film, black and white, silent, 9 min
- Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Coyolxauhqui 2017. 16 mm film transferred to HD video, colour, sound
- Lawrence Lek Dead Souls 2020. Audio track 5 min
Kent Chan, Tremors 2021, film still. Courtesy the artist
Composed of Laura Huertas Millan, Onyeka Igwe and Rachael Rakes, Counter Encounters is a curatorial and research initiative active since 2019. They engage forms of anti- and alter- ethnographies in cinema and contemporary art. They have presented programmes and exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, New York); and It’s a Mutant Space conference, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The collective recently contributed a text to the catalogue for the exhibition No Master Territories at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and are editing the October issue of the journal World Records.
Female voice: Is my fire able to burn?
The text reveals the lines of flying thoughts, firing thoughts and family trees, flowers kissing each other.
The family tree is torn down, she came crossing deep waters, generations away. Cut.
Curl over and dissolve into foam. Cut hand, cut feet, cut lips, cut filaments, chopped.
The petal of Musa gets so tense that it breaks and falls on my feet.
Manman dlo.
Pelvis, arteries, cervix, tubes.
The sea takes (translation of Creole).
Which one of my petals is ready to fall?
In the falling revolution, when the sun turns… Context.
Should the door of no return be crossed again? Ouidah.
The flower brings memories back.
Grandma, grandmother, mother, sister. My Atlantics. Bones covered with sand, and on the sand rest of boats, no lack of self-esteem.
A walk from skin to organ, from water to fire, from blood to air… The light moves.
After breaking on the shore, the new wave leaves toward the sea. She has no time to stay a stranger to herself.
Pleasure.
An island of round lineage considered to be listened.
Menstruality, sensoriality, place of senses opening the time inside the cycle.
Let go the pain. The night opens
An electric impulse passes everywhere coming from deep surfaces, and on our fingers we read history. Vertical labour of the path mapping power in falling tension.
Body of banana rope, body of wrapped head, body with tied up hips. Body that fights to go forward. The sea takes (translation of Creole).
Cosmic trade of blood linking forces. Abya Yala, land to flourish, chopped.
You are your own mother, no shame.
Nothing. No shame now, nothing
I wrote on the skin of petals and predict.
Imaginative stretch of attention. How is my fire fed?
She was beaten, she, third petal, rises eleven times. She will be enslaved, fight for her freedom, soon aborted and get enslaved again until the second abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe. Tenth petal.
In the belly, the Musa woman loses her scales.
Rocks roll to the bottom of the sea. Stars are infinite in me. The body of the sea speaks (translation of Creole).
I can go back five generations, inside my body, and name the line, name her multiple times. For now I have lost the sixth name.
Thoughts streaming into my womb, valley offering a mermaid tale, and a vision of my land.
Olympe, our volcano, mountain that I could met already silent, you are the deepest named root of my tree.
Turn blood into eyes, turn air into lukewarm water. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Put your hand on your belly. Do nothing.
Repeated lyrics:
I'm nobody
Don't you think that's enough for me?
Dead souls
All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Turbine Hall and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner street.
The Starr Cinema is on Level 1 of the Natalie Bell Building. There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Nathalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.
There is space for wheelchairs and a hearing loop is available.
All works screened in the Starr Cinema have English captions.
- Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
- A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
- Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.
To help plan your visit to Tate Modern, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information about what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.
For more information before your visit:
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