Une Terre Familière | 18:04 | HD | 2013

Where is there to belong to? To not feel strange? To not ask permission? Ground. Home. A familiar land.

Une Terre Familière is structured as a series of long-take vignettes, each centered around a site purposing a collision of nature and artifice. Within highly manicured environments, these sites attempt to imitate natural processes and un-peopled ecosystems and to preserve and manage elements of nature. The figures in Une Terre Familière struggle to do their best with what they have–to find their own sun at the tanning salon, their own clouds in the steam room–to improve, to connect, to find “home” in the world.

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“A small waterfall, right in the middle of impenetrable green. The scene could be in the Amazon jungle, if the banks did not seem to be so strangely linear, somehow arranged. If the water were not so unnaturally still. And now a group of well-dressed strollers come into the picture, on the other side of the pond. What are they talking about? About the nature surrounding them? Or about appointments to have their hair done?

A newly ploughed field in thick mist. The view hidden, as if by a veil. An autumn morning. Tiny water droplets waft in the air. It smells of fresh, dark earth. Profound solitude. But then a woman with a pram crosses the field. Is it really a field? At a second glance the ground is too even, as if it has been rolled flat. Will this earth soon be covered by gravel and tarmac?

A narrow chamber. The camera from above. Neon light. Cabinets of natural history specimens, in every drawer three, four, five times the same. No window. No way out. A man is bending over one of the drawers. Nothing stirs. No movement. No life.

A museum. A dry sapling in the glass case. A blue, globelike ball rotates soundlessly about itself. How distant the world is! How far away we are from everything. And yet much too close. Our fingerprints on every surface. Our odour in every corner. Everything catalogued and well-ordered, fenced in, known. And yet this earth remains so intangible. Completely foreign, sealed, silent.“ – Videonale.15
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Participation: Department of Zoology and Bird Division at the Field Museum